The subtitle of David Becker’s essay in the most recent issue of the Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch, “Schopenhauer on the Meaning of Tragedy: Vision and Blindness,” seems to interpret Schopenhauer’s radical reconception of modern tragedy as a mistake on the part of the philosopher, though Schopenhauer’s radicalism inheres in that very (only seeming) error. In his otherwise timely and insightful study, Becker, after considering both ancient Greek and Shakespearean forms of the genre, writes:
… “modern” (certainly Shakespearean) tragedy, in common with its ancient predecessors, manifests a belief in the existence of an overarching moral and spiritual order to the universe, which the tragedy of the individual merely confirms.
Yet it is precisely the aspect of tragedy that Schopenhauer, unsurprisingly, cannot see. If one believes in a world ruled by a fundamentally malevolent and irrational “force,” then of course one cannot credit tragedy with the affirmation of a divine order and harmony. Hence, Schopenhauer was blind to those aspects of tragedy, both ancient and modern, which affirm the coherence and moral order of the universe. He not only rejected such a perspective, he completely failed to see its presence in tragic drama.[1]
Schopenhauer can only be said to have been “unsurprisingly” blind, indeed, if his conception of tragedy did not reflect his conviction that the universe has no coherence or moral order — but this was in fact a correlate, if not definition, of Schopenhauer’s worldview. It is a failing not of Schopenhauer’s tragic aesthetic but of previous forms of tragedy that they failed to recognize this amoral chaos; instead, both Shakespeare and the ancients took refuge in the definition of the world, as Becker puts it, as a “Cosmos, rather than a Chaos, a realm of ultimate order and rational law.”[2] Lacking that order and law itself, the Will cannot be fully recognized or absorbed in these earlier forms of tragedy, for its chaos and blind lawlessness cannot be reconciled in the phenomenal world, if at all.
In the second part of the essay, which considers Schopenhauer’s conception of life as illusion, as a “veil of Maya,” Becker considers the differences between the ancient and the Shakespearean modes of tragedy, at the same time underscoring the essential rationale of tragedy as a preparation for contemplation and resignation. He helpfully suggests that the onstage action must be a reflection of the terror and pain in which the human individual finds him or herself, inescapably, in the phenomenal world, but that the onstage action cannot itself represent that contemplation or aesthetic salvation that lies beyond it:
For Schopenhauer, the question of the true nature of our existence takes us beyond tragedy. Greek tragedy can bring us to the point where we fully comprehend the futility of our striving for happiness, and the inevitability of the destruction of the individual. Modern tragedy, according to him, takes us further, to the point where we may glimpse, as if through a glass darkly, not merely the futility of life but its fundamentally illusory nature. We are thus prepared for the final step, which must be achieved philosophically rather than by means of similes and metaphors of art. … Schopenhauer understood art in general, and tragedy in particular, as propaedeutic — that is as paving the way for the ultimate transcendent knowledge which only philosophy can impart. It points beyond itself, to that which it cannot name. … [Tragedy] leads to a higher state of awareness, not that of mere peaceful contemplation, but of full and total renunciation of the Will itself. … [Tragedy] can take man only so far along the path to his ultimate salvation. What lies beyond is not susceptible to any form of dramatization, or indeed conceptualization, of any kind. It is beyond the realm of communicable experience.[3]
One of the necessary forms that aesthetic experience takes is that of disinterest from the experience being contemplated: We are no more Oedipus or Agamemnon themselves than we are Ian or Cate of Blasted or, for that matter, Vladimir and Estragon of Waiting for Godot. Instead they represent to us our condition, and any question of identification of spectator and spectacle is rendered not only moot, but leads to a particular kind of blindness itself: in identifying with these characters, either through empathy or sympathy, we are blinded by these characters’ very own perceptual limitations. Only in rare moments do these characters glimpse a truth behind the veil, as Vladimir does, very briefly, at the conclusion of the Beckett play, in which he also describes that Schopenhauerian conception of life as a dream from which we must awaken:
Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be? (Estragon, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off again. Vladimir looks at him.) He’ll know nothing. He’ll tell me about the blows he received and I’ll give him a carrot. (Pause.) Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener. (He looks again at Estragon.) At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (Pause.) I can’t go on! (Pause.) What have I said?
If Schopenhauer was in error, it was indeed an error of omission, but the omission was of one of the paths to a form of salvation aside from that of aesthetic contemplation or saintlike asceticism — that of erotic ecstasy. It is a curious lacking from a philosopher who considered eroticism and desire as the primary phenomenological trace of the noumenal will; as such, the integration of an erotic element to tragedy would more completely fulfill Schopenhauer’s conception of dramatic tragedy as the form which best reflects the station of mankind in the universe — not to result in a Dionysian embrace of a “will-to-life” itself, a new kind of blindness, but to negation of the individual and repudiation of the suffering world — and provides human beings with the most powerful concoction of that propaedeutic, a counsel to repudiation.
Footnotes
Simply put, there is no blindness in the Dionysian embrace of a “will-to-life,” for the term or the action is to be understood under the full philosophical scope of the Dionysian rubric, hence a will to life does not involve evading death. Death is an intrinsic part of life. As Diodorus Siculus said, one who has died a characteristic death ended his life with his own death.” There is no opposition between bios and Thanatos—that is a common fallacy (not yours). From the start, for Nietzsche, there is no such thing as the individual; it is an illusion, and the Dionysian celebration can only commence with the erasure of the individual. As for repudiation of the suffering world, is that not to remain thoroughly Christian, thoroughly metaphysical, thoroughly romantic in the worst sense . . . ?
If the individual does not exist, how can he be erased? (A chilling term in any case.) I’m willing to concede that Nietzsche may be differentiating between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds, between the Thing-in-itself and representation, but if he is not, he can’t have his cake and eat it too. I’m also willing to concede that the repudiation that must precede resignation — the turning of the will against itself in this phenomenal world, however futile — reaches the realm of the mystical (a reach that Schopenhauer admitted partook of mysticism in the Eastern and Christian senses) in its seeming contradiction. But then, it is what must be called an “irrational” act in the rationalist world.
“Worst” sense? Perhaps “best” sense. But these are value judgments that must be traced to first principles. And it was these first principles that Nietzsche ultimately rejected in Schopenhauer’s work. I myself, individual that I am, need not reject them. And it is this individuality which has its highest value; only the individual, not the blind collective, can repudiate the will in the world. (Indeed, if it were not for the individual — the principium individuationis itself — there would be no subject to conceive of the world.)
Following the erasure of the individual — that is, a return to the Thing-in-itself — well, that is something of which, being unknowable by us individuals in the phenomenal world, we cannot speak.
Perhaps I’m misreading, but it doesn’t seem to me that Shakespeare’s tragedies reflect a belief in a moral order for the universe. They all end with a sense of bleakness.
At the end of Hamlet, bodies litter the stage. The bad guy has been punished, but all the other dead people are innocent. And Hamlet never does find out if the ghost told the truth (the audience knows, but Hamlet does not). Fortinbras, who has no legitimate claim to the throne, now wears the crown. The devil, who is either the ghost or uses the ghost as his mouthpiece, has won.
When Othello ends, Iago, the villain, is in custody, but his evil scheme has worked. More bodies on the stage.
Macbeth ends with the good guy king, but at a terrible cost.
And Lear ends with no one wearing the crown.
In Shakespeare’s tragedies, entropy wins.
To be precise, they all end with a restoration of state order. Whether or not Fortinbras has a “legitimate” claim to the throne depends on how you read Horatio’s rather tedious exposition of the political situation in I.i, but he does order the stage to be cleared for his reign (and young Fortinbras is in some ways a double for young Hamlet, as old Fortinbras was for old Hamlet). It appears that some combination of Albany, Kent and Edgar (quite unclear this) will rule England in the wake of Lear’s death, but this too is revealed in the final scene of the play, and as you note, Malcolm is firmly in control of Scotland at the curtain of Macbeth.
In a sense I think these derive from the historical context of Shakespeare’s tragedies, which were written over the passing of the monarchy from Elizabeth to James. Because Elizabeth was childless, there was a profound anxiety over the hereditary succession of the crown and a sense of constitutional crisis. Shakespeare belonged to the company of actors known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (under Elizabeth) and the King’s Men (under James), and from these authorities received their patronage. He was, in more ways than one, a “company man,” and it was clearly in the interest of his company that the tragedies had to end with a form of conciliation which confirmed that order had been restored in Denmark, England and Scotland — and so the universe — as order would be maintained in the transition of government from Elizabeth to James. (Much as, I suppose, The Eumenides established justice at the close of the Oresteia.) To conclude these plays in any other way would have undermined these claims to the order of the universe.
I imagine this is also why the tragedies have appealed to contemporary British dramatists like Bond, Rudkin, Barker and Rabey, all of whom have “annexed” certain of Shakespeare’s tragedies to deny them that very closure.
Yes, someone is in charge at the end of the tragedies. But the cost has been enormous. And the mood at the end of the tragdies hardly seems hopeful. As for Fortinbras, I am thinking more of I, ii, where Claudius breezily dismisses the claims of Fortinbras and dispatches messengers to the king of Norway so that he can rein in his son.
On the individual, what was meant was not exist in an absolute sense, not exist as something permanent. Nietzsche distinguishes between the ego, the subject, the “I,” and the self, which is something essentially created, and necessarily so, albeit out of the existing strata of our bodies, etc. “For the individual [Einzelne], the ‘single man’ [Individuum], as people and philosophers understood him, is an error: he does not constitute a separate entity, an atom, a ‘link in the chain,’ something merely inherited from the past—he constitutes the entire SINGLE line ‘man’ up to and including himself.” (TI SUM 33). “Erasure” was too inaccurate a word; there, what is more precisely meant is loss, the loss of self, releasing one’s quotidian self or ‘individuality’ during the ecstatic celebration.— To repudiate because of suffering is a value judgment; it is to view suffering derogatorily, as something reprehensible. To repudiate because of suffering is to refuse suffering, which seems a very refusal of the tragic.