Question of Tragic Art

Fixed_Cross · March 3, 2012, 9:46am

This question has been on my mind for very long, as long as I’ve been reading Nietzsche. What exactly is tragic art? I know what a tragedy is. I recognize a tragic storyline. I know the “feeling” of the tragic, as a surplus that breaks itself up into a destruction of bewildering beauty - but I do not have sufficient clarity on what Nietzsche means when he speaks of the tragic… not because I lack clarity, but because it is so all-important. Perhaps the most important concept in his work. It needs to be elaborated on much more bitterly than the will to power or the eternal recurrence, or slave versus master morality – it is perhaps the realest, most alive concept. Because of this realness it not as easy for me to clarify.

So the question is: what is tragic art? Can we have examples? Music, plays, novels, films – scenes from any of these… classical but preferably also contemporary – what is a contemporary tragedy - no, what represents “the tragic” in a contemporary form?

Here is the passage that inspired the question.

What is Romanticism?

It will be remembered perhaps, at least among my friends, that at first I assailed the modern world with some gross errors and exaggerations, but at any rate with hope in my heart. I recognised who knows from what personal experiences? the philosophical pessimism of the nineteenth century as the symptom of a higher power of thought, a more daring courage and a more triumphant plenitude of life than had been characteristic of the eighteenth century, the age of Hume, Kant, Condillac and the sensualists: so that the tragic view of things seemed to me the peculiar luxury of our culture, its most precious, noble, and dangerous mode of prodigality; but nevertheless, in view of its overflowing wealth, a justifiable luxury. In the same way I interpreted for myself German music as the expression of a Dionysian power in the German soul: I thought I heard in it the earthquake by means of which a primeval force that had been imprisoned for ages was finally finding vent indifferent as to whether all that usually calls itself culture was thereby made to totter. It is obvious that I then misunderstood what constitutes the veritable character both of philosophical pessimism and of German music, namely, their Romanticism. What is Romanticism? Every art and every philosophy may be regarded as a healing and helping appliance in the service of growing, struggling life: they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: on the one hand those that suffer from overflowing vitality, who need Dionysian art, and require a tragic view and insight into life; and on the other hand those who suffer from reduced vitality, who seek repose, quietness, calm seas, and deliverance from themselves through art or knowledge, or else intoxication, spasm, bewilderment and madness. All Romanticism in art and knowledge responds to the twofold craving of the latter; to them Schopenhauer as well as Wagner responded (and responds), to name those most celebrated and decided romanticists, who were then misunderstood by me (not however to their disadvantage, as may be reasonably conceded to me). The being richest in overflowing vitality, the Dionysian God and man, may not only allow himself the spectacle of the horrible and question able, but even the fearful deed itself, and all the luxury of destruction, disorganisation and negation. With him evil, senselessness and ugliness seem as it were licensed, in consequence of the overflowing plenitude of procreative, fructifying power, which can convert every desert into a luxuriant orchard. Conversely, the greatest sufferer, the man poorest in vitality, would have most need of mildness, peace and kindliness in thought and action: he would need, if possible, a God who is specially the God of the sick, a “Saviour”; similarly he would have need of logic, the abstract intelligibility of existence for logic soothes and gives confidence; in short he would need a certain warm, fear dispelling narrowness and imprisonment within optimistic horizons. In this manner I gradually began to understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian pessimist; in a similar manner also the “Christian” who in fact is only a type of Epicurean, and like him essentially a romanticist: and my vision has always become keener in tracing that most difficult and insidious of all forms of retrospective inference^ in which most mistakes have been made the inference from the work to its author from the deed to its doer, from the ideal to him who needs it, from every mode of thinking and valuing to the imperative want behind it. In regard to all aesthetic values I now avail myself of this radical distinction: I ask in every single case” Has hunger or superfluity become creative here"? At the outset another distinction might seem to recommend itself more it is far more conspicuous, namely, to have in view whether the desire for rigidity, for perpetuation, for being is the cause of the creating, or the desire for destruction, for change, for the new, for the future for becoming. But when looked at more carefully, both these kinds of desire prove themselves ambiguous, and are explicable precisely according to the before-mentioned, and, as it seems to me, rightly preferred scheme. The desire for destruction, change and becoming, may be the expression of overflowing power, pregnant with futurity (my terminus for this is of course the word “Dionysian”); but it may also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, destitute and unfortunate, which destroys, and must destroy, because the enduring, yea, all that endures, in fact all being, excites and provokes it. To understand this emotion we have but to look closely at our anarchists. The will to perpetuation requires equally a double interpretation. It may on the one hand proceed from gratitude and love: art of this origin will always be an art of apotheosis, perhaps dithyrambic, as with Rubens, mocking divinely, as with Hafiz, or clear and kind-hearted as with Goethe, and spreading a Homeric brightness and glory over everything (in this case I speak of Apollonian art). It may also, however, be the tyrannical will of a sorely-suffering, struggling or tortured being, who would like to stamp his most personal, individual and narrow characteristics, the very idiosyncrasy of his suffering, as an obligatory law and constraint on others; who, as it were, takes revenge on all things, in that he imprints, enforces and brands his image, the image of his torture, upon them. The latter is romantic pessimism in its most extreme form, whether it be as Schopenhauerian will philosophy, or as Wagnerian music: romantic pessimism, the last great event in the destiny of our civilisation. (That there may be quite a different kind of pessimism, a classical pessimism this presentiment and vision belongs to me, as something inseparable from me, as my proprium and ipsissimum; only that the word “classical” is repugnant to my ears, it has become far too worn, too indefinite and indistinguishable. I call that pessimism of the future, for it is coming! I see it coming! Dionysian pessimism.)

(Nietzsche: The Gay Science, 370)

Fixed_Cross · March 3, 2012, 10:04am

I made the same post on Before The Light.

I am also interested in artists who can be associated with the tragic. And to broaden the topic, perhaps not only art, but also tragic approaches to the “stage of the world” , versus romantic or otherwise weaker ones. I want to expand the thinking on the tragic as well as bring it to the surface, to actuality.

Does the concept suffering, the affirmation of suffering amount to a sense of tragedy? I don’t think so, but it is clearly important. What else is required for the tragic sense?

Can we re-shape our (interpretation of our) own cultural and political narrative in accordance with this sense? Can this perhaps be the first step in affirming what is happening? Or am I taking this into a far too practical direction now? No, I don’t think so - this is precisely what we are lacking now, what traps us (as a civilization) in nihilism or resentment - the lack of the tragic sense, the will to utopia.

I don’t even know what I am suggesting. Let anyone begin with an explanation of what it means for a “sense”, or a narrative, or anything at all, to be tragic.

Fixed_Cross · March 12, 2012, 4:27pm

Capable has provided an excellent answer. He is the only one so far. Sad but true - true thus great - sad thus great! (definition of the tragic through dialectic of affirmation)

Capable:

The element of ‘affirmation’ in the tragic seems to represent a more inherent, central characteristic of tragedy, involved directly within the sense or pathos of it: the lack of power to alter the tragic circumstances, to avert tragedy. This lack is present at the beginning and builds all the while the tragic aesthetic itself builds – it is a necessary condition for it. This sustained disharmony could be experienced in our own lives, or vicariously through the lives of others, through art or upon the stage. Tragic might then be interpreted as a directly sensing of or pathos birthed in the light of a higher or more-reflned, more-sublimated experience of a “lack of power”. All such lack would at first arise as an experience of a more immediate suffering or pain. As this is sustained over time and transforms into woe and despair, then finally into regret and resignation, the specific sense/pathos of this lack arising from these becomes likewise stronger, and ultimately gains its own patho-logical “nature” and “psychological” subjective inertia. Which is to say that other subjective states begin to orbit the new patho-logical trajectory. This tragic pathos, born of a sustained and cultivated sense “disharmony”-as-lack with respect to some otherwise overflowing vitality and value, becomes a signifying marker and symbol, a definitional relation.

We might now interpret this movement as a mechanism whereby the valuing subject is left open before its possibilities in light of the fact that these possibilities would otherwise either remains largely closed or be directly militated against and pre-empted by the superior sense or cultivated pathos of experience of vitality (self-valuing becoming conscious of itself as value [but not necessarily yet as self-valuing capacity]). Tragic keeps the subject from walling off those which present as painful remainders in the equations of its self-value, painful reminders of what, from the vantage point of the self-affirmative and vital subject, constitute its own inescapable limit and highest failure (which it would like to, and indeed often must ignore for the sake of itself, for the sake of its own power and value and the “will to” these). Tragic operates directly to mediate the subjective relationship with these otherwise “remainder” or failed elements, as well as to keep open the space for the possibility of these at a later time.

Nietzsche seemed to have interpreted this as a "despair of all ‘it was’ " and of which (i.e. the past) we can do nothing about. A will to will backward ought to be cultivated, according to Nietzsche, to will all “it was” as “it is”, as a “thus do I will it”. Here we arrive at his derivation of the Eternal Return. So now we can see that the ER is a principle which begins with an understanding of the tragic, and it is Nietzsche’s way of conceptualizing and objectifying (and then attempting to “solve”, to resolve) the relation between subjective tragedy (the inescapability of self-failure/s) and its possible apotheosis/utility. Too much or too little tragedy is self-destructive. Nietzsche thus seemed to have sensed this and was attempting to trace a healthy the middle ground.

Tragic art then would be that art which inspires and evokes, sustaining and allowing for the tragic pathos to remain in view and un-“repressed”. Thus would the subject that harbors the greater amount of this tragic pathos within it experience therefore the greater quality of reaction, strength and immediacy of value and meaning in the presence of tragic art; it finds its own greater catharsis and respite, and a focusing potency wherein it is able to encounter aspects of itself, through tragic art, which otherwise would remain to the subject unstated and uneludicated. Thus can the appreciation for tragic art be used as a sort of litmus test for the quality and character of a subject, which is what I think Nietzsche was trying to get at, and to explain/make use of.

Sauwelios · May 3, 2012, 1:22am

Fixed Cross:

This question has been on my mind for very long, as long as I’ve been reading Nietzsche. What exactly is tragic art? I know what a tragedy is. I recognize a tragic storyline. I know the “feeling” of the tragic, as a surplus that breaks itself up into a destruction of bewildering beauty - but I do not have sufficient clarity on what Nietzsche means when he speaks of the tragic… not because I lack clarity, but because it is so all-important. Perhaps the most important concept in his work. It needs to be elaborated on much more bitterly than the will to power or the eternal recurrence, or slave versus master morality – it is perhaps the realest, most alive concept. Because of this realness it not as easy for me to clarify.

So the question is: what is tragic art? Can we have examples? Music, plays, novels, films – scenes from any of these… classical but preferably also contemporary – what is a contemporary tragedy - no, what represents “the tragic” in a contemporary form?

The Dutch Wikipedia article on virtue ethics has paradoxically suggested to me that tragic poetry is not a poetry… The article says:

[size=95]Aristotle’s virtue ethics is teleological. This means that it follows the logic of purpose (telos). It presupposes that people act for the sake of a purpose, which they judge to be the good. In acting, then, people always aim at a good. The highest good is the ultimate purpose of acting.

So Aristotle claims that all human acting is done for a purpose. In doing so, he discerns two forms of acting: poièin and pratein, which the respective substantive nouns poetie and praxis. A poietic act is done for a purpose that lies outside the act: as soon as the purpose is reached, the act ends. For instance, as soon as the table is finished one is done carpenting. A praxis however is an act whose purpose lies in the acting itself. A game serves its purpose only during play; the fun that the game brings disappears as soon as the playing stops. The type of acting with which virtue ethics is concerned is acting understood as praxis. It [virtue ethics] regards life as the comprehensive praxis. [http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deugdethiek#Teleologie_en_handelen. It seems the source of the content of this passage consists of two books by Paul van Tongeren.][/size]
Now Nietzsche writes, at the very end of his last book that is not a nachgelassene Schrift (“writing left behind”):

[size=95]Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems; the will to life, rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility in the sacrifice of its highest types—that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to be liberated from terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous affect by its vehement discharge [does one engage in tragic poetry]—Aristotle understood it that way—: but in order to be oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity,—that joy which includes even joy in destroying… [Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “What I Owe to the Ancients”, section 5.][/size]
Note that, even though Nietzsche repudiates the teleology that Aristotle imputed to tragic poetry, he still imputes a kind of teleology to it: “in order to be oneself” etc. We may say, as I have put it elsewhere, that Aristotle understood tragic poetry as a means to an end that lay beyond it; whereas Nietzsche understands it as a means to an end it contains in itself: the lightning (the Dionysian) is not sought out in order to purge one’s sky of clouds, i.e., for the sake of the sun (the Apollinian), but for it’s own sake, identifying with it. Tragic art, then, is not a poetry but a practice. For this reason, we cannot have examples of tragic art, inasmuch as art that is perceived by some as tragic is not perceived that way by others, and vice versa. Now what people usually call tragic art is art that tends to have a tragic effect on normal adults under normal circumstances, and in this sense one may say that one can “create” (poiein) tragic art. But tragic poetry in this sense is distinct from tragic art proper, which is a practice, not a poetry. Thus the Urtragödie (“primitive tragedy”) was a spontaneous event in which there were no mere spectators, but only chorus, and the actor (Dionysus or the tragic hero) was wholly imagined. Later that image was projected on one of the participants in the event, and this participant then evolved into the actor: before Aeschylus, tragic plays had only a single actor. Aeschylus’ most radical innovation was the introduction of a second actor, and Sophocles introduced a third actor. Nietzsche however criticized the great tragedians more strongly the further they deviated from the Urtragödie: Euripides more strongly than Sophocles, and Sophocles more strongly than Aeschylus. Except in his last work, the Bacchae, Euripides marginalized the role of the chorus; but even Aeschylus’ major innovation already contained the seed of this marginalization, since from the introduction of the second actor on the chorus could in theory be put out of play indefinitely: namely in the event of an endless dialogue between the two actors. (One might think that one could already say the same thing of the introduction of a real actor in the first place, since he could in theory hold an endless monologue. However, the concept of monodrama was utterly foreign to the Greeks; and lyric poetry, which is cognate with drama, would, if one were to compare it to drama, be a kind of drama whose cast consisted solely of a one-man chorus, not of a single actor.)

I disagree, by the way, with your claim that Nietzsche’s concept of the tragic “needs to be elaborated on much more bitterly than the will to power”. For I regard Nietzsche’s concept of the tragic as integral to his concept of the will to power. Thus the willing of the will to power is not to power as the carpenting is to the table (I’m aware at this point, by the way, that “carpent” is not an English word; but fuck English); instead, it is to power as the playing of the game is to the fun. Willing is itself the manifestation of power. But past discussions between us suggest that you and I conceive the will to power very differently.

Pezerocles · May 3, 2012, 3:19am

I haven’t read much of this thread, but to the intro my answer is:

Pedro Almodovar is today’s foremost tragedy artist.

There is also Oldboy, a Korean tragedy that almost measues up to Almodovar because, although it is lesser quality filmmaking, the tragedy itself is truly very tragic.

Lars von Trier is like a guy who looked at tragedy for a while and took a step forward… Whether that step forward was a step up or down seems to depend on my mood.

El Topo and Holy Mountain both have multiple tragedies within, and Jodorowski can really put it into acid-think clarity.

Brazil has put out at least three exelent tragedies that I can think of, but a Brazilian is probably genetically unable to make even a tragedy kathartic. They are masters of tragic beauty.

A Venezuelan artist put out a movie called Hermano (Brother) which plays with some decidedly ancient themes, but in a truly ghetto context (the kind that makes Compton seem like Beverly Hills) and, in all objectivity, it is tragic.

In fact, now that I think about it, the only contemporary cinema that really tragically moves me is South American tragedy (with the exception of Oldboy). I have seen some amazingly good European tragedies, but they aren’t nevessarily good because they are tragic. And the US really has no more blood fro tragedy that I can think of… Though they remain forrunners in surreal cinema.

Fixed_Cross · May 4, 2012, 4:51pm

On the contrary Sauwelios, we agree on the nature of the will to power more and more as you arrive at clarification of the circularity of the concept, the way its head (telos) attains to its tail (origin). That you don’t see value ontology as a separate concept adding to the power of the first explanation is “tragic”, but unimportant here. This is a very educative post. The distinction of the two types of teleology is not new to me, it is included in value ontology (the self being the value one acts (values) to attain). I did not however know anything about this evolution of tragic drama. Indeed the introduction of an actor separates the audience from the action, and is therefore already a watering down of the intoxication, the vitality provided by the tragedy, and relativizes it’s impact on society. I very much like the idea of a choir, with a group of “not so innocent bystanders”, and an imagined Dionysos. The choir as the medium for the citizen to attain a Dionysian experience, which purges of the obstructions to living purely to attain life (the obstructions being moral and physiological, “restrictions”), without any extraneous telos.

MagsJ · May 4, 2012, 10:06pm

For me… Toulousse Lautrec was the epitomy of what a tragic artist is, but I’m sure he would have preferred not to be…

The surrealists created masterpieces because they lived such tragic and haunted lives, and now their art is the priciest in the world and their best pieces hang in the corridors of The Hermitage where those lucky enough can gaze upon them.

Sauwelios · May 8, 2012, 3:53pm

Before I try to reply to the above, let me first make this perfectly clear:

When I said “the willing of the will to power is […] to power as the playing of the game is to the fun”, I did not mean the two “ofs” in the same grammatical sense; I did not mean “the willing of the will to power” in the sense that the will to power is the object of the willing (i.e., that the will to power is what is willed), but in the sense that a will to power is a willing to power, and that this willing is to power as playing is to fun. Likewise, Christoph Cox writes: “The ‘willing’ of will to power, Nietzsche writes, ‘is not “desiring,” striving, demanding’; rather, it is ‘[t]hat state of tension by virtue of which a force seeks to discharge itself’ (WP 668).” (Cox, Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation, page 230.))

Has this been understood?

Except for the introductions of second and third actors, I suppose, it’s all in chapters 7 and 8 of The Birth of Tragedy.

You understand that, in primitive tragedy, there was no distinction between the chorus and the group of “not so innocent bystanders”, right? I can’t tell whether you mean “medium” in a literal or a metaphorical sense.