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Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us Paperback – March 17, 2020
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Tragedy presents a world of conflict and troubling emotion, a world where private and public lives collide and collapse. A world where morality is ambiguous and the powerful humiliate and destroy the powerless. A world where justice always seems to be on both sides of a conflict and sugarcoated words serve as cover for clandestine operations of violence. A world rather like our own.
The ancient Greeks hold a mirror up to us in which we see all the desolation and delusion of our lives but also the terrifying beauty and intensity of existence. This is not a time for consolation prizes and the fatuous banalities of the self-help industry and pop philosophy.
Tragedy allows us to glimpse, in its harsh and unforgiving glare, the burning core of our aliveness. If we give ourselves the chance to look at tragedy, we might see further and more clearly.
- Print length336 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateMarch 17, 2020
- Dimensions5.12 x 0.71 x 7.94 inches
- ISBN-100525564640
- ISBN-13978-0525564645
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Frank, personal readings of hallowed plots, including Euripides’ Trojan Women and Aeschylus’ Oresteia. . . . Pay attention and you can reinvent your life.” —The New Yorker
“A striking portrayal of Greek tragedy. . . . A well-pitched and paced primer, which is fun to read” —The Times Literary Supplement (London)
“A thrill . . . riveting. . . . A rather intoxicating dance with words, ideas, texts, the vortex of the life of the mind in the world, and perhaps beyond it. Critchley is an authoritative reader, and, though not a classicist, he proves an erudite, scholarly guide through layers of myth, reason, history and their interpretation, and overall a truly beguiling one . . . Often reminiscent of Arendt, Adorno or even Levinas, verbally affluent, muscular and provocative . . . He is a particularly gifted wordsmith, an astute orator, a shrewd and learned disputant. Those who encounter tragedy for the first time on the pages of his book will not fail to be bewitched.” —Bookanista
“Stirring. . . . Refreshing. . . . Irreverent. . . . Critchley writes with laudable directness and erudition” —NPR
“Substantial introductory material on tragedy and ancient philosophy; it is energetic, engaging and thought-provoking without too much abstraction and with just enough detail to add flavor. . . . It has something of the chatty vigor of a successful seminar discussion. . . . Infectiously enthusiastic. . . . Genuinely invigorating.” —New Statesman
“Critchley finds a perspective on tragedy open to its revelatory and transformative power. Readers feel that power as they probe the dazzling words and tempestuous emotions in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and—above all—Euripides. . . . Postmodern philosophy collides with ancient drama, generating the heat of passion, the sparks of illumination.” —Booklist [starred]
“[An] intelligent, rigorous book. Dedicated readers will have the sense of being at a thoughtful scholar’s side as he works through an intractable intellectual problem.” —Publishers Weekly
“An erudite reconsideration of Greek tragedy. . . . For students of Greek drama, a revelatory contemplation of the theater's enduring power. ” —Kirkus Reviews
“Combining a thorough knowledge of Attic drama, fluency with the scholarly literature, and an engaging wit, Critchley’s treatment is sophisticated yet accessible to thoughtful general readers.” —Library Journal
“Engaging and congenial . . . [Tragedy, The Greeks and Us] makes the cogent, compelling argument that we ignore Greek Tragedy at our own peril.” —New York Journal of Books
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Feeding the Ancients with Our Own Blood
Tragedy shows what is perishable, what is fragile, and what is slow moving about us. In a world defined by relentless speed and the unending acceleration of information flows that cultivate amnesia and an endless thirst for the short-term future allegedly guaranteed through worship of the new prosthetic gods of technology, tragedy is a way of applying the emergency brake.
Tragedy slows things down by confronting us with what we do not know about ourselves: an unknown force that unleashes violent effects on us on a daily, indeed often minute-by-minute basis. Such is the sometimes terrifying presence of the past that we might seek to disavow but that will have its victory in the end, if only in the form of our mortality. We might think we are through with the past, but the past isn’t through with us. Through its sudden reversals of fortune and rageful recognition of the truth of our origins, tragedy permits us to come face-to-face with what we do not know about ourselves but what makes those selves the things they are. Tragedy provokes what snags in our being, the snares and booby traps of the past that we blindly trip over in our relentless, stumbling, forward movement. This is what the ancients called “fate,” and it requires our complicity in order to come down on us.
Yet, the fruit of a consideration of tragedy is not a sense of life’s hopelessness or moral resignation, as Schopenhauer thought, but—I think—a deepened sense of the self in its utter dependency on others. It is a question of the self’s vulnerable exposure to apparently familiar and familial patterns of kinship (although it sometimes turns out that, like Oedipus, you don’t know who your parents are, but if you do know who your parents are, you still don’t know who they are). One of the most salient but enigmatic features of Greek tragedy is its constant negotiation with the other, especially the enemy other, the foreign other, the “barbaric” other. The oldest extant piece of theater that we possess, Aeschylus’s The Persians, from 472 BCE, depicts the defeated enemy not with triumph but with sympathy and with an anticipation of the possible humiliation that might face the Athenians should they repeat the hybris of the Persians by invading Greece and desecrating the altars of the enemy’s gods. Sadly, the Athenians did not heed Aeschylus’s lesson, and the brief period of Athenian imperial hegemony in the central decades of the fifth century BCE ended in the humiliating defeat of the Peloponnesian Wars. There is perhaps a moral to be drawn here for our time and place, where the empire knows its heyday is over and we live in a constant state of war. The first rule of war is sympathy with the enemy. This is something that can be seen in the tragedies of Euripides, especially those that deal with the bloody end of the Trojan War, in plays like The Trojan Women and Hecuba.
As Aristotle put it perspicuously and somewhat blithely nearly a century after the zenith of Greek drama in the second half of the fifth century BCE, tragedy is the imitation of action, mimesis praxeos. But what exactly is meant by action? It is far from clear. In play after play of the three great tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides), what we see are characters who are utterly disoriented by the situation in which they find themselves. They do not know how to act. We find human beings somehow compelled to follow a path of suffering that allows them to raise questions that admit of no easy answer: What will happen to me? How can I choose the right path of action? The overwhelming experience of tragedy is a disorientation expressed in one bewildered and frequently repeated question: What shall I do?
Tragedy is not about the metaphysical cultivation of the bios theoretikos, the contemplative life that is the supposed fruit of philosophy in Aristotle’s Ethics, or in Epicurus and the other Hellenistic schools. Nor is it about the cultivation of the life of the gods or divine life, ho bios theois, which is also the constant promise of philosophy from Plato onward, as we will see. No, tragedy is thinking in action, thinking upon action, for the sake of action, where the action takes place offstage and is often described to us indirectly through the character of a messenger. But this thinking takes the form of a radical questioning: How do I act? What shall I do? If tragedy is mimesis praxeos, then it is action that is called into question through tragedy, divided and sliced open. What the experience of tragedy invites is neither the blind impulsiveness of action, nor some retreat into a solitary life of contemplation, but the difficulty and uncertainty of action in a world defined by ambiguity, where right always seems to be on both sides. Hegel is right to insist that tragedy is the collision between opposed yet mutually justified claims to what is right. But if both sides are right, then what on earth do we do?
Part of the joy of wandering into the ancient world and dealing with seemingly remote phenomena like Attic tragedy (and I will use the adjectives Attic, Athenian, and Greek interchangeably to name the same phenomenon) is how little we know and how little we will ever know. Of the many things we don’t know about ancient tragedy, the most important and most enigmatic is some sense of what the spectator was expected to take away from these spectacles. The ancient Greek word for “spectator” was theoros, from which we get the word theoria, theory. Theoria is linked to the verb “to see,” theorein, which takes place in a theater, a theatron, to name the act of spectating. If tragedy is the imitation of action, of praxis, although the nature of action remains deeply enigmatic, then praxis is something seen from a theoretical perspective. Or, better said perhaps, the question of theory and practice, or the gap between theory and practice, first opens in theater and as theater. Theater is always theoretical, and theory is a theater, where we are spectators on a drama that unfolds: our drama. In theater, human action, human praxis, is called into question theoretically. Otherwise said, praxis is internally divided or questioned by theoria in the space of the theater, where the empty space of the theater is a way of calling into question the spaces we inhabit and subverting the divisions that constitute social and political space.
Now, aside from a fragment by the great Sophist Gorgias that we will look at in a little while—and Gorgias is one of the heroes of this book—and Aristophanes’ The Frogs, where he stages a debate between Euripides and Aeschylus as to who is the best tragedian that I will discuss in Part 5, the only spectator reports on tragedy that we possess come from Plato and Aristotle, who had various axes to grind. In the case of Plato, it is a little like basing your view of the Vikings on the reports of the Christian monks whose monasteries they ransacked. Aristotle appears more benevolent, but appearances can be deceptive. Despite some wonderful and important historical, philological, and archeological work, we have little idea how tragedy was seen and what the audience thought. We have no online reviews, no blogs, and no tweets. Nor do we even know for sure who attended the plays. For example, we cannot be certain whether any women attended the festivals where the tragedies were performed with such an abundance of female characters. But, in my view, far from being a vice, this epistemic deficit, this lack of knowledge is, I think, a virtue. Tragedy, for me, is the life of skepticism, where the latter is the index for a certain moral orientation in the world, an orientation that seems to emerge from the disorientation of not knowing what to do. I hope to make good on this thought as we move through the following chapters.
In a lecture delivered in Oxford in 1908, Wilamowitz—Nietzsche’s nemesis, who savaged some of the questionable philological claims of The Birth of Tragedy—said,
The tradition yields us only ruins. The more closely we test and examine them, the more clearly we see how ruinous they are; and out of the ruins no whole can be built. The tradition is dead; our task is to revivify life that has passed away. We know that ghosts cannot speak until they have drunk blood; and the spirits which we evoke demand the blood of our hearts. We give it to them gladly.
Of course, the irony here is that Nietzsche says the same thing, namely that it is our blood that makes the ancients speak to us. Without wanting to piggyback on the dizzying recent success of vampire fiction, the latter’s portion of truth is that the ancients need a little of our true blood in order to speak to us. When revived, we will notice that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves. They tell us about us. But who is that “us” that might still be claimed and compelled by these ancient texts, by these ruins? And here is both the beauty and strangeness of this thought: This “us” is not necessarily existent. It is us, but in some new way, some alien manner. It is us, but not as we have seen ourselves before, turned inside out and upside down.
Another way of putting this is to say that the “we” that we find in tragedy is invitational, an invitation to visit another sense of who we are and who we might become. I borrow this thought from Bernard Williams’s Shame and Necessity, to which I will return in the following chapter. The idea of invitation has been interestingly developed by Raymond Geuss in the eponymous, final chapter of his A World without Why as a kind of procedure, if not a method. For Geuss, one is invited to look at two or more things placed in conjunction without necessarily asking the question why this is the case or seeking for a cause. A pile of dead bodies in a ditch in Iraq is placed alongside the prime minister of the United Kingdom speaking oleaginously in the House of Commons. Here, the idea of invitation can produce an unexpected juxtaposition or disjunction that provokes thinking. In my view, tragedy invites its audience to look at such disjunctions between two or more claims to truth, justice, or whatever without immediately seeking a unifying ground or reconciling the phenomena into a higher unity.
My concern in thinking about tragedy and what I will call “tragedy’s philosophy” is to extend an invitation to you to become part of a “we,” the “we” that is summoned and called into question by ancient tragedy. More simply stated, every generation has to reinvent the classics. I think it is the responsibility of every generation to engage in this reinvention. And it is the very opposite of any and all kinds of cultural conservatism. If we don’t accept this invitation, then we risk becoming even more stupefied by the present and endless onrush of the future. The nice thing is that stupefaction can be really easily avoided by nothing more difficult than reading, and most of the plays are not even that long, which is one reason why I like reading plays. Indeed, although this might sound pompous, I see this as the responsibility of each generation: to pass on something of the deep and unknown past in a way that will speak to the present and arrest us momentarily from the irresistible pull of the future. If the disavowal of the past through the endless production of the new is the very formula for ideology in our societies, then tragedy provides enduring resources for a critique of that ideology that might at least allow for the imagination of a different range of human possibilities. First, however, we need to reach for the emergency brake: STOP!
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage; Reprint edition (March 17, 2020)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0525564640
- ISBN-13 : 978-0525564645
- Item Weight : 8.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.12 x 0.71 x 7.94 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #471,444 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #114 in Tragic Dramas & Plays
- #438 in Ancient Greek History (Books)
- #827 in Ancient Greek & Roman Philosophy
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About the author
Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is series moderator of “The Stone,” a philosophy column in the New York Times, to which he is a frequent contributor.
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It's not that I agree with Critchley on every point. Almost the opposite in a sense. I WANTED to give him a negative review. He works for the New York Times so you can expect him to feel compelled to constantly display his liberal credentials. He bows down uncritically before the most absurd queer and trans theories, then stretches a reading to make sure the reader knows he opposes Trump's immigration policy, then downplays Aristophanes withering critique of democracy as though somehow Aristophanes didn't really mean it. But the point is it all fades into the background. There are SO MANY GOOD INSIGHTS that he provides from so many different directions that the three or four you disagree with don't really bother you. His sincerity and intellect are ever-present, he covers a huge range of subjects in single slim volume, but I think most of all what I responded to is how "alive" the problem of tragedy is in the modern world for him. He does an excellent job of investigating fifth century Athens while speaking to the situation of twenty-first century America and anybody interested in either of those subjects should read this (very affordably) priced book.
As a fan of his, and having read a good portion of his writing, I can say that may be his best work--but that's arguable. It's clear in any case, he's spent years developing his point of view on Tragedy, and because of that, there's a richness and potency here that is deep.
This book is also very needed, because beyond being wise on tragic storytelling, it's fundamental thesis is true and so important for our world now.
As a Professor myself, I will be thinking about what I learned here for some time. I will go back to it, and plan on using many questions he's raised in my Literature classes--starting perhaps with poor Oedipus.
Critchley argues that the ancients need "a little of our own blood" to speak to us. He means that by becoming engaged with the passions and dilemmas of the ancient plays, "we" people of today can get a broader, deeper understanding of who we are and who we might become. Critchley writes:
"Without wanting to piggyback on the dizzying success of vampire fiction, the latter's portion of truth is that the ancients need a little of our true blood in order to speak to us. When revived, we will notice that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves. They tell us about us. But who is the 'us' that might still be claimed and compelled by these ancient texts, by these ruins? And here is both the beauty and strangeness of this thought: This 'us is not necessarily existent. It is us, but in some new way, some alien manner. It is us, but not as we have seen ourselves before, turned inside out and upside down."
With this enigmatic introduction, Critchley offers a complex portrayal of Greek tragedy that focuses on the ambiguities of the human condition and of the multi-faceted, competing characters of human goods that come into conflict in Greek tragedy and in human life. He discusses how seemingly autonomous individuals are controlled by their past, with little degree of self-knowledge. Critchley shows how Greek tragedy displays both the scope of and the severe limits of human reason. In a provocative passage, Critchley contrasts the polytheism of Greek tragedy with the monotheism of the three leading Western religions. He writes:
"What is preferable about the world of Greek tragedy is that it is a polytheistic world with a diversity of deeply flawed gods and rival conceptions of the good. It is my conviction, ... that the lesson of tragedy is that it is prudent to abandon any notion of monotheism whether it is either of the three Abrahamic monotheisms, a Platonic monotheism rooted in the metaphysical primacy of the Good, or indeed the secular monotheism of liberal democracy and human rights that still circles around a weak, deistic conception of God."
Late in his book, he characterizes tragedy and drama as showing what it means to be alive. In a conversation about the themes of tragedy, an actor tells Critchely he is overly taken with concepts. She says: "Of course, what theater is about is a certain experience of aliveness. That's all that matters. The rest is just ideas. Good ideas, maybe. But just ideas."
The development of Critchley's understanding of tragedy offers more than enough for a book, but Critchley offers still more. Critchley contrasts the approach to life of the Greek dramatists with the approach taken slightly thereafter by Greek philosophy, largely in the figures of Plato and Aristotle. Critchley contrasts the "philosophy of tragedy" of the philosophers with the "tragedy of philosophy" of the dramatists. He argues that philosophers tried to use reason to come to an idealistic, unitary understanding of the nature of life; and that through the centuries, as argued by Nietzsche, the claims of reason were dashed, leading to nihilism. The tragedians were wiser in their skepticism of the power of reason. They were more akin, in Critchley's telling to sophist thinkers such as Gorgias in emphasizing rhetoric and the irreducible character of many human separate human goods than to Plato and Aristotle.
The complexity of this book makes it wander and feel somewhat disjointed. The opening section of the book titled "Introduction" offers a broad, wide-ranging statement of Critchley's themes and aims. The following section "Tragedy" ranges widely and explores, among other things, a small number of Greek dramas, scholarly studies, and Hegel's thoughts on tragedy.
The third part of the book explores Greek sophistry, with a focus on Georgias and some of his little-known writings. I found this valuable. Critchley also discusses Plato's treatment of the sophists with a focus on the "Phaedrus" and the "Georgias". Critchley's discussion of the sophists and his sympathy with them over Plato and Aristotle reminded me of Carlin Romano's book, "America the Philosophical" which likewise prefers the sophists to the absolutism of Plato and Aristotle and links sophism to the American philosophy of pragmatism.
The fourth part of the book is a lengthy discussion of Plato's "Republic" and an exposition and critique of his views on tragedy. Then, the book offers an equally detailed treatment of Aristotle's "Poetics" together with a considerable discussion of Euripides as a possible counter-example to some of what Aristotle says. The book in all its parts moves back and forth between discussions of particular Greek plays, discussions of Greek philosophy, discussions of later-day philosophers and critics, and broad discussion and argument about tragedy's continued significance.
The "Acknowledgement" section of a book is usually routine, but I found Critchley's deeply moving. Critchley is not a classical philosopher by training and admits to the weaknesses in his study of ancient Greek. The child of an English working-class family, Critchley was initially a poor student before a perceptive history teacher recommended to the young 11 year old "The Greeks" by H.D.F. Kitto. I read Kitto's book early in my studies and was surprised to learn of its importance to Critchley. Critchley came relatively late to academic life. His book both brought back memories of my own study and enhanced my understanding of Greek drama and Greek philosophy.
Robin Friedman
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The author does a good job showing how there are no real rules of tragedy just the need to be creative and 'alive'. Sophocles and, particularly Euripides, sought to test boundaries and flout expectations rather than be generic formulaic drama. They are blatant about this and some of their plays sound pretty odd.
The book is well-written and Critichley manages to be very thorough and get into some big discussions without really being overly academic about it. He doesn’t try to reference all the research, just to glean the most interesting bits which he summarises and explains in a pleasingly relaxed and confident way. He split the book into 61 chapters and this suits this approach - he can dive into a topic for 5 or 6 pages link it back to his argument and move on. He keeps it on track and the momentum up. I found it more-ish, as I am sure it was meant to be.
The big sections are on Plato’s rejection of poets, including tragic poets, in 'The Republic' on moralistic grounds. He contrasts this to Aristotle’s counter attempt, in the 'Poetics', to work from the evidence, sifting it to find the true nature of tragedy (a ground-up approach that differs from Plato's top-down moralising approach). Both attempts are ironically tragic in the sense that it is the bits they leave out, the creative playfulness, that fatally hollows out their argument. The opening section on the sophist Gorgias was good to flag up the confusion irony causes but then there was no further reference to it when it would have helped develop and round out some of the later points.
I liked best the discussion of a possible way to reconstruct Aristotle’s lost treatise on comedy (Chs. 56-7). I liked the insight, a few chapters earlier, that Aristotle wrote his Poetics during the decade (335-326BC) when Lycurgus, Athens’ civic leader, ordered the main tragedies to be gathered and stored in official versions. Critchley explains how Lycurgus wanted to protect the play texts against a new class of professional actors trying to big up their roles!
But oh, dear! I have made it sound more ‘academic’ than it really is. Don't worry - It's all good: ‘grown-up reading' that I recommend it to those who like that.
そういうわけで、ちょっと前にネットで見つけたのがこの本だった。作者は英国人の哲学者。作品は専門家向けではなく、一般人向けに書かれているようだ。とはいえ、本書でギリシア悲劇や哲学者の作品が取り上げられる際も、それぞれについての詳しい説明はなく、読者がこれらの作品についてすでに一定程度の知識を持っていることが前提とされている。
全体の構成は、以下の6つのパートに分かれている。
I. Introduction
II. Tragedy
III. Sophistry
IV. Plato
V. Aristotle
VI. Conclusion
そして全体は61の章に分かれている。270ページの作品だから、それぞれの章は4ページほどだ。というわけで途中で投げ出したくなる誘惑のリスクに対してはそれなりのヘッジが組み込まれている作品だ。まー何とか展開される議論についていけるのだ。著者の文体はわかりやすいものだが、使われる言葉は結構こった単語が選択されている。また文中に頻発されるギリシア語については、登場するたびに英語での説明が必ず捕捉されている。
ちまちま読んでいたので思った以上に読み終えるのに時間がかかってしまった。結論から言うと、本書で展開される議論はやはりわかりにくい。いやわかりやすい部分とそうでない部分があり、そして議論は様々な方向に拡散されるので、拡散された後、全体を通しての理解が困難なのだ。それぞれの短い章での議論は、もしかすると学校での講義をベースとしているのかもしれない。丁寧でわかりやすいのだが、これらの議論がどのように有機的に展開されて結合して終わりに向かっていくのかが、ちまちま読んでいると、どうもわかりにくいのだ。
「悲劇」という作品はプラトン流の合理的な哲学と対比され、なぜ「悲劇」というジャンルがプラトンから決して評価されることがなかったのたかが繰り返し説明される。この対比の文脈から、ギリシア悲劇という恐怖と憐憫(fear and pity)に訴えかける芸術がアテネの政冶体制で持った役割り、プラトン流の哲学との本質的な相違などが明らかにされていく。哲学との絡みで、必然性と自由意志の二項対立の構図にうまく収まらない「悲劇」というジャンルの特異性、そして悲劇というレパートリーの特徴などが解き明かされていく。特にアリストテレスの「詩学」という作品に相当のスペースが割かれている。ギリシア悲劇というとアイスキュロス、ソフォクレス、エウリピデスに代表されるのだが、そこで特にページが割かれるのは、「悲劇」というジャンルの脱構築への流れを示したエウリピデスなのだ。
結論には、2つの章がある。その一つには「Transgenerational Curse」つまり「世代を超える呪い」という表題がついている。ここでは、「オイディプス王」を題材として、運命、自由意志と因果関係、歴史、記憶、時間、知るということ、などの基本的な視点から、作品が解釈されている。そして最後の章で強調されるのが、生の感覚としての「Aliveness」だ。悲劇はつまるところ生き生きとした演劇の作品なのだ。そういう意味ではこの結論の二つの章だけをまず最初に読んでみるというのもひとつの読み方かもしれない。
お恥ずかしいながら、門外漢によるとりとめのないレビューになってしまった。