CHAPTER FIVE GERMANS AND GREEKS The Greeks are what we were; they are what we shall become again. - - - Schiller 1 Like Mozart and his librettists, many German writers and philosophers were drawn to the Enlightenment by virtue of its liberating potential, but they were also frightened by the threat to order it posed. German intellectuals sought to benefit from the Enlightenment but also to tame it, and sought to do so within a politically fragmented Germany ruled for the most part by conservative aristocrats. For both reasons they turned to lost traditions, which they sought to discover and bring back to life. This was manifest first and most importantly in the German obsession with ancient Greece but also in the Grimm brothers' turn to folk culture in the hope of recapturing wisdom from the past, the search for the Aryan prototype for Christianity by religious scholars and philologists, the proliferation of stories, poetry and frescoes based on the medieval Nibelungenlied,
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CHAPTER FIVE
GERMANS AND GREEKS
The Greeks are what we were; they are what we shall become again.
- - - Schiller1
Like Mozart and his librettists, many German writers and philosophers were drawn to the
Enlightenment by virtue of its liberating potential, but they were also frightened by the threat to
order it posed. German intellectuals sought to benefit from the Enlightenment but also to tame it,
and sought to do so within a politically fragmented Germany ruled for the most part by
conservative aristocrats. For both reasons they turned to lost traditions, which they sought to
discover and bring back to life. This was manifest first and most importantly in the German
obsession with ancient Greece but also in the Grimm brothers' turn to folk culture in the hope of
recapturing wisdom from the past, the search for the Aryan prototype for Christianity by
religious scholars and philologists, the proliferation of stories, poetry and frescoes based on the
medieval Nibelungenlied, Wagner's appropriation of the Edda for the theme of his Ring Cycle
and Nietzsche's invocation of the Persian Zarathustra for his culminating philosophical work.2
For nineteenth century Germans, myths were templates for building national identities that
would transcend regional, religious and class differences.
For those who turned to Greece, the polis, but especially Athens, was imagined as a
model for a creative and progressive German nation. Nostalgia for imagined pasts was a
continent-wide phenomenon, as intellectuals everywhere sought to cope with the consequences
of the Napoleonic Wars and later, of industrialization.3 The deeply-felt German affinity for a
highly idealized Greece must also be understood as a response to Germany’s late political,
economic and cultural development and the sense of inferiority it engendered. In practice, the
turn to Golden Age Greece would have profoundly negative consequences for Germany’s
political development.
GREECE REDISCOVERED
Early modern Europe was largely ignorant of ancient Greece. The burning of the library
in Alexandria (417 BCE) destroyed much literature, including many Greek tragedies that remain
lost. We have only seven of Sophocles 123 known plays. Greek writings came back to Europe
via the Arabs, and often in Arabic translation. Making use of these texts, the Renaissance
revived an interest in tragedy. The first staging of Sophocles’ Oedipus took place in 1585 in
Vicenza.4 Monteverdi wrote his two operas with Greek mythological story lines in the first half
of the seventeenth century. Opera was intended to reproduce tragedy on the questionable
assumption that tragic characters sang their lines.5 Chapman, and later Pope, produced good
Engliish translations of Homer and by the nineteenth century translating Homer had become
something of a national pastime. Hobbes’ translation of Thucydides was central to his
philosophical development. But it was not until the nineteenth century that Greek texts become a
core component of the English university curriculum.6
In the United States, there was a general interest in Athens beginning in the late
eighteenth century, much of it connected to the country’s experiment with democracy. If the
Pilgrims envisaged their colony as the new Jerusalem, democrats understood America to be the
new Athens. This belief was reflected in place names and in the Greek Revival in architecture.
The founding fathers were nevertheless more influenced by Rome and English writings and
political practices. They rejected the Athenian model because they opposed direct democracy,
2
and thought the experience of a small city state not very relevant to the vast expanse of the
Thirteen Colonies. Following British practice, Latin and Greek nevertheless became an
important subjects in the educational system.7
In Germany, Graecophilia reached a level unequaled anywhere else. The first German
translations of Homer appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century. The poet and
playwright Hölderlin authored widely read translations of Sophocles in the early nineteenth
century. The Germans were unique in their efforts to rejuvenate tragedy, not as a genre, but as a
means of nourishing ethical and political sensibilities appropriate to the time. This project had
its roots in Kant but really began with the publication in 1795 of Schelling’s Letters on
Dogmatism and Criticism. Tragedy became the vehicle by which a succession of German
philosophers, among them Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin and Arendt sought
to probe such questions as the meaning of history, the nature and foundation of ethics, the role of
Germany, and often, the relationships among the three.
A more popular fascination with Greece spread in Germany. It fed on a highly idealized
understanding of that culture and its artistic creations as the product of an era in which thought
and feeling, and reason and expression were in harmony. This image of Greece was propagated
by Johann Winckelmann, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich August Wolff, Wilhelm von Humboldt
and Friedrich Schleiermacher. They envisaged Greek art and literature as the foundation of
Bildung, by came to signify education and self-improvement in its broadest sense. In 1792,
Humboldt, a humanist and civil servant, wrote to Greek philologist Friedrich August Wolf that
"no other people combined such simplicity and naturalness with so much culture, and no other
possessed such persevering energy and sensitivity for every impression."8 Many Germans of his
and the next generation sought to discover themselves through their intimate involvement with
3
Greek culture. This project of Menscheit in Altertum was expected to overcome social divisions
and unite Germans by encouraging them to understand themselves in terms of the totality of their
faculties rather than as members of a particular class or estate.9 The fascination with Greece --
especially in Prussia and Protestant Germany -- continued through the nineteenth century,
despite efforts by Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt to debunk the highly romanticized
understanding that had taken root. It reached its zenith with Friedrich Schliemann’s possible
discovery of Troy in 1871, which captured the imagination of the entire country, and was taken
as further evidence of Germany’s scientific preeminence.10 Philhellenism was initially the
preserve of the elite, but was gradually diffused through the population by the educational
system. It became a defining feature of middle class intellectuals [Bildungsbürgertum] and
1
REFERENCES
? Schiller, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, p. 84.
2 Marchand, Down from Olympus; Chytry, Aesthetic State; Ferris, Silent Urns; Williamson,
Longing for Myth in Germany, all make this point.
3 Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, p. 204.
4. Burian, “Tragedy Adapted for Stages and Screens.”
5. Ibid.
6 Turner, Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain; Stern, Rise of Romantic Hellenism in English
Literature; Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece; Porter, "Homer."
7 Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece; Jenkyns and Turner, The Greek Heritage in
Victorian Britain; Turner, "Why the Greeks and not the Romans in Victorian Britain?"
8 Wilhelm von Humboldt to Friedrich August Wolf, 4 December 1792, cited in Sweet, Wilhelm
von Humboldt, I, p. 121.
4
considered part of the national patrimony. As philhellenism spread and became linked to state
institutions it became more conventional and conservative in its aims. By mid-century it was
something of a tyrannical trope, whose supporters used their control of the educational system
and cultural institutions to marginalize critics and maintain their hegemonic position.11
Germans were different from British and Americans in their fascination with tragedy and
the degree to which it and ancient Athens became central to their efforts to construct a national
identity. Following the post-Napoleonic political repression in Prussia, ancient Greece also
became the foundation on which alienated intellectuals attempted to construct an alternative
cultural identity. In this chapter, I ask why Germans became so fascinated with Greece, and
Greek tragedy in particular. I examine the political consequences of this involvement for
Germany and Europe. In doing so, I distinguish philosophers from publicists, as their motives
and influence, while they overlap considerably, are best analyzed separately. With the
philosophers, the consequences of their thought are diverse and cross-cutting. On the positive
side, the development of German philosophy and its progression from Kant through Heidegger,
and beyond to Gadamer, Benjamin, Arendt, Habermas represents one of the great intellectual
achievements of the modern era. This philosophical edifice may nevertheless have had negative
political consequences for Germany. It provided the intellectual justification for what German
historians refer to as the special path [Sonderweg] of Germany’s political development in the
nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries and subsequently helped to alienate German
9. Potts, Flesh and the Ideal; Buford, German Tradition of Self-Cultivation; Butler, Tyranny of
Greece over Germany; Marchand, Down From Olympus; Taylor, Hegel, pp. 25-29.
10 McDonald, Progress into the Past; Marchand, Down From Olympus, 116-24, 148-50; Ferris,
Silent Urns, pp. 16-51; Chytry, Aesthetic State, pp. 148-77.
11 Marchand, Down From Olympus, for documentation.
5
intellectuals from the Weimar Republic. The German fascination with tragedy illustrates one of
the most powerful truths of this ancient genre. Greek playwrights knew that the world is bigger
than we are, that its dynamics will always remain to a large degree opaque and that the
consequences of our actions are accordingly unpredictable. Like Oedipus, we never know when
we are at a critical crossroads, or when actions, whose consequences appear transparent, will
produce outcomes diametrically opposed to those intended. It is no stretch of the imagination to
read the German fascination with tragedy as a tragedy.
In considering the unfortunate and unintended consequences of Germany’s intellectual
trajectory in the nineteenth century, I want to disassociate myself from those scholars and critics
who have launched a broader critique against modernity. Leo Strauss, a conservative political
theorist, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and postmodernist philosopher and literary theorist Jean
François Lyotard, attribute the worst political horrors of the twentieth century to the
Enlightenment and its unqualified faith in reason. Such a sweeping accusation reflects the
ideological assumptions of these authors more than it represents any reasoned argument. It
exaggerates the triumph of reason over tradition and superstition and ignores the many benefits
of reason, including modern science and medicine, economic development and the gradual
spread of racial, religious and gender tolerance.
My argument is different and, I hope, more nuanced. Some of the Germans in question,
most notably Kant, are prominently associated with the Enlightenment but also with the
emerging counter-Enlightenment. Others, like Schelling and Hölderlin, are considered leading
figures of the counter-Enlightenment.12 The Enlightenment elevated reason as the source of all
knowledge and science as its most perfect expression. History, art, poetry and the world of
feeling were deeply suspect and dismissed as props of the church and aristocracy.13 Voltaire,
6
following a line of argument that stretched back to Plato, condemned poetry as a form of
dangerous “figurative” language.14 The counter-Enlightenment portrayed reason as a pernicious
force that divided man from nature and sought to reverse this trend by restoring respect for
feeling and art as its principal form of expression. Some of its principal advocates envisaged art
as providing an absolute standard of beauty and the basis for the individual cultivation of the
self. For Kant, the experience of beauty is one in which imagination is harmonized with
understanding without the intervention or constraint of concepts, including those concerning the
moral good.15
Much of the German philosophical enterprise from Kant on must be understood as a
reaction to science and the skepticism and materialism it encouraged. Schelling, Fichte and
Hegel refused to concede that everything outside of science was mere poetry and a lesser form of
knowledge. Inspired by Rousseau and Jacobi, Novalis lauds “feeling” as a mode of
consciousness distinct from conceptual knowledge and suggests that the negation of reflection
can put us on the path to being.16 Many of these philosophers and writers rejected the emerging
model of science as the benchmark for knowledge, developed the alternative conception of
Geisteswissenschaft -- which became the “Humanities” or “interpretative sciences” of the
English speaking world. They sought to provide philosophical foundations for it as well as
12 Larmore, "Hölderlin and Novalis"; Sturma, "Politics and the New Mythology"; Schmidt, On
Germans and Other Greeks, pp. 122-64; Beiser, German Idealism, pp. 391-96.
13 Kateb, “Utopia and the Good Life”; Dupré, Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of
Modern Culture, pp. 187-228, on new approaches to history.
14 Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary..
15 Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,
16 Frank, “Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism.”
7
appropriate standards for its evaluation. This was a goal of Kant’s Critique of Judgment and
Schiller’s essay on “Aesthetic Education of Man” and a major theme of Hegel’s
Phenomenology.17 “Only when philosophy and metaphysics got into crisis in relation to the
cognitive claims of the sciences,” Hans-George Gadamer observes, did philosophers have the
incentive to “discover again their proximity to poetry which they had denied since Plato.”18
I am not the first to see a dark side to German philosophical idealism. German cultural
historians – most notably Fritz Stern -- see a connection between German idealism and the later
success of fascism. German idealism drew on earlier esthetic ideals and moral concerns. It
emphasized the cultivation of Innerlichkeit [inner development] and did not encourage political
participation or even concern with political issues and outcomes.19 Germany’s intellectual elite
“tended to become estranged from reality and disdainful of it. It lost the power to deal with
practical matters in practical terms."20 Fritz Ringer maintains that German universities fanned
this sense of idealistic insulation and with it, an opposition to change on the grounds that it
represented a moral decline.21 Several generations of generally apolitical Germans expressed
alarm over the economic and social changes associated with modernity, among them Thomas
Mann, Ernst Troeltsch, Friedrich Naumann and Christian Morgenstern. For some Germans, this
sense of alienation helped to nourish an anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic right-wing discourse.22
17 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 7, puts equal emphasis on reason, and rejects sentiment as a
guide;
18 Gadamer, Ästhetik un Poetik I, quoted in Bowie, "German Idealism and the Arts."
19 Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, pp. 15-17.
20 Ibid., p. 15.
21 Ringer, Decline of the German Mandarins, p. 29.
22 Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, pp. 15-17.
8
The negative consequences of German idealism are all the more poignant when we recognize the
extraordinary intellectual contribution of German idealism and its offshoots. The influence of
German idealism has been so profound and influential in how we have come to think about the
modern world that it is almost impossible to imagine ourselves and our world in its absence.
The great innovator and founder of the Idealist tradition was Kant, who straddled the
Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. He employed reason in the form of powerful,
logical arguments to demonstrate its inability to understand our relation to the universal, which
he thought human beings nevertheless struggled to comprehend. However, he also attributed
great power to beauty and nature and their ability to shape the self through their apprehension by
non-reflexive means; the intuition and creativity they inspired could lead to understandings
inaccessible to the theoretical sciences. Reason and feeling, two parts of the self, could be
brought into harmony and provide a firm basis for morality. This belief was based on the more
fundamental assumption of an isomorphism between man and nature and, as the Critique of
Judgment suggested, a purposive principle in nature. Kant and his successors struggled to find
new foundations for ethics, sought them in human drives and capabilities that went beyond
logical inquiry, brought nature and beauty back into the purview of philosophy, and provided a
novel way of understanding the Greeks and Western history more generally. Marxism, Freudian
psychiatry and existentialism are direct outgrowths of German idealism or dependent on them in
important ways.
As my subject is complex, I adopt a layered approach. Each layer captures one reason for
German interest in Greek tragedy and ancient Greece more generally. I begin with philosophy as
an ethical project, then explore political motivations, and finally explain the turn to tragedy with
reference to Germany’s situation as a late cultural developer. These three layers might also be
9
conceived as concentric circles. The inner most circle encompasses a small group of literary
figures and philosophers and their recondite ethical concerns. The next circle out includes the
wider class of German intellectuals and the roles they aspired to play in the states in which they
resided, but above all in Prussia. The outermost circle situates Germany in Europe and considers
its comparative position. All three are connected by the theme of tragedy and the efforts of
intellectuals to construct identities for themselves and their states considered appropriate to the
rapidly modernizing world of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Analysis at these three levels helps to explain the appearance in Germany of idealism and
its implications for Germany's political development. It also encourages thoughts about the
relationship between agency and structure in the construction of identity. The German turn to
tragedy, I argue, was in the first instance a response to a philosophical-ethical problem, and the
work of agency. In the absence of Kant, German idealism might have been stillborn, or certainly
would not have developed in the manner it did. Even without Kant, German writers and
thinkers, reacting to the French Revolution and its aftermath, would have been drawn to the
counter-Enlightenment and its rejection of reason as a more appropriate guide for human
behavior and social relations. Some German historians consider their country’s political
development unique and a deviation from the pattern established by Britain, France and the
countries of northwest Europe. There are many reasons for wariness about the “Sonderweg”
thesis, among them the dubious assumption that there was a single pattern followed by
Germany’s neighbors.23 In A Cultural Theory of International Relations, I argue that there was a
pattern to which Germany conformed, that scholars have missed because they have compared
Germany to the countries of Western Europe. If we look east instead, it is apparent that the
rejection of Western values by many intellectuals was a typical response of late developers, a
10
situation Germany shared with Russia and Japan.24 So it might be argued that the general
direction taken by German philosophy, was a predictable response to a specific political-
economic condition. Agency nevertheless played an important role, giving German philosophy
its specific content and giving rise to a particular Weltanschauung. German intellectuals
confronted choices that were in no way predetermined by circumstances. Different German
intellectuals made different choices, and had more of them made the right choices the German
tragedy might have been averted.
THE GREEKS AND PHILOSOPHY
Like almost everything else in modern German thought, theorizing about tragedy
developed in response to Kant. The Königsberg philosopher never mentioned the word tragedy,
but made it imperative for his successors to tackle the subject. His work pointed to the end of the
philosophy of the metaphysical and made tragedy appear an appropriate vehicle for reflection.
Subsequent German philosophers envisaged tragedy as a means of overcoming metaphysics,
understanding the course of history and preparing the way for cultural revolution. These
philosophers also theorized about tragedy itself and sought to evaluate it as an art form. Hegel,
for whom tragedy was central, wrote about it in his Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807) and
Lectures on Fine Art (1823-29).
Art versus Philosophy: Kant’s philosophical project was above all a response to Humean
skepticism. He sought to provide an alternative foundation for ethics that did not rely on telos or
natural law. His starting point was the assumption that it was impossible for us to cognize our
relation to the universal, but we could grasp our moral need for understanding. Human nature
23 Eley “British Model and the German Road”; Evans, Rethinking German History.
24 Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations, ch. 8.
11
compels us to seek universals. We find them through faith, which is reason’s form of moral
thinking and allows us to affirm that which is real but inaccessible to theoretical cognition. Kant
effectively challenged a philosophical tradition that had dominated Western thought since Plato
had substituted philosophy for literature as the appropriate vehicle for exploring the human
condition. Kant restored literature’s role, giving it coequal status with philosophy.
Kant's successors sought to build on his belief about the isomorphism between the world
and the self by providing firmer foundations for the noumenal self and its relationship to the
empirical world. The attempt to overcome Kantian dualism – noumenal and empirical selves --
led some philosophers and writers to aesthetics in the hope it would serve as an effective bridge
between the worlds of spirit and matter. Novalis and Hölderlin took this road, as did Schelling
and Hegel – all of whom were fellow students at the Tübingen Stift [theological seminary].25
Hölderlin and Novalis imagined a level of being prior to consciousness in which subject and
object are not yet divided. This level of being was not accessible to consciousness, only to art.
Artistic genius, which they thought arose directly from our being, was therefore the true route to
knowledge. Kant emphasized the role of genius in this connection in his Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment.26 Art opens up a realm to us that is unavailable to reflection.
Hegel alone among the German philosophers would resist this move, insisting that only
abstract reflection can generate moral truths. Hegel reversed Kant, who had defined freedom and
its limitations in terms of the self's rational understanding of the noumenal world. For Hegel, it
was the empirical world that provided this guidance. In his imagined polis, ethical life
[Sittlichkeit] arose from civic interaction because the Greek world was still naïve in the sense
25 Nauen, Revolution, Idealism, and Human Freedom; La Vopa, Fichte, pp. 200-04, on the
personal relations among these figures.
26 Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, §§ 41-54.
12
that it was not darkened by the shadows of individual self-reflection in search of meaning and
identity.27
Schelling and Kierkegaard followed Kant’s lead, as did Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Schelling’s Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795) – which precede Hegel’s first major
publication by a decade – reintroduced tragic art into the philosophical discourse. Schelling
describes tragedy as the highest form of art and suggests that philosophy can be transformed
through engagement with it. His System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), speaks of
philosophy flowing back into the supreme art of poesy.28 Nietzsche would use the same trope in
the Birth of Tragedy (1872), where he wrote that "Philosophy, which was born and nurtured by
poesy in the childhood of science, and which accompanied all those sciences and brought them
into maturity and completion in their sundry individual streams, now flows back into the
universal ocean of poesy, whence they all originated.”29 His approach to tragedy stands in sharp
contrast to W. A. Schlegel and the British classicist George Grote, both of whom linked tragedy
to democratic politics.30
Kant’s turn to literature occurred within his broader engagement with problem of
judgment, specifically ethical judgment. He describes art as an expression of the “free play”
inherent in our nature. Here Kant takes a cue from Aristotle, who understood art as a natural
impulse and source of learning. For Aristotle, however, art is defined by its mimetic character; it
27 On Hegel, especially, Phenomenology of the Spirit.
28 Schelling, Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, and System of Transcendental Idealism,
3.627-28.
29 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, section 3, 629.
30 Silk and Stern, Nietsche on Tragedy, pp. 297-331 on Nietzsche's response to earlier
interpretations of the origins of tragedy.
13
is an imitation and distillation of real life experience, although it also draws on other natural
impulses like harmony and rhythm.31 For Kant, as for Aristotle, art is education in the most
fundamental sense, and something only accessible to ethical beings. Kant was nevertheless
committed to renegotiating the relationship of the truths generated by art and science. This
required the liberation of the imagination from any rules governing particular art forms. To
reveal truths about the world art must go beyond mimesis to poisēs, the act of creation itself.32
Despite their many differences, Hölderlin, Hegel and Nietzsche follow Kant in their recognition
of the force of art in human affairs. They do not envisage writing, style, performance, pictorial
images and rhythm as recherché academic concerns, but as a fundamental concern of philosophy.
Art and language are media in their own right, that exist beyond and independent of concepts.
They are -- and here I must resort to the kind of tortured language that pervades German
philosophy -- the idiom of the idiom that eludes capture by concepts. Art and language have the
ability to speak to us directly. They can lead us to new understandings of the world rather than
merely express known realities.33
Kant's successors understood that philosophy and its concepts were embedded in
language. It encouraged the turn to art as an alernative to language but also the search for a new
language for philosophy. Schelling developed the notion of Bildungstrieb, the impulse to make
art. Hölderlin, who declared that “man is born for art,” initiated this move with his translations
of Sophocles, Greek poetry and an attempt to write his own tragedy.34 He sought to follow the
poetic imperative in the hope that it would reveal the deepest possibilities of language and
31 Aristotle, Poetics, 1448b7-1449a18.
32 Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment; Pinkard, German Philosophy, pp. 66-81; Schaper,
"Taste, Sublimity and Genius."
33 Taylor, Hegel, ch. 1.
14
thereby enable the rebirth of ethical human beings. Hölderlin aspired to reconstruct the German
language to make it more like Greek, and to speak and write it with the syntax, word order and
sensibility of that language. Although German idealism rejected mimesis, Hölderlin engaged in
what can only be described as a kind of linguistic mimesis, and struggled to bring out the
“oriental” character of Greek life in his written work.35
Romanticism made artistic creation the vehicle of self-discovery, and the artist the model
human being. In 1788, Friedrich Schiller published “Die Götter Greichenlands” [The Gods of
Greece], which quickly become one of his most influential poems. It contrasted the allegedly
happy, harmonious and beautiful world of the Greeks with the somber, materialist and anti-
creative spirit of the present day.36 In this poem and other writings Schiller propounded the idea
of self-realization through the aesthetic; life and form must come together in the beauty of the
living form [lebende Gestalt].37 “If man is ever to solve the problem of politics in practice,” he
wrote, “he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only
through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.”38 In 1798, Friedrich Schlegel made a
similar plea: "One has tried for so long to apply mathematics to music and painting; now try it
34 Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, II, p. 62, quoted in Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks, p.
53.
35 Larmore, "Hölderlin and Novalis"; Sturma, "Politics and the New Mythology"; Schmidt, On
Germans and Other Greeks, pp. 122-64; Chytry, Aesthetic State, pp. 115-77; Ferris, Silent Urns,
pp. 158-200.
15
the other way around."39 For both writers, and German idealists more generally, the relationship
of the subject to the world is better mediated by feelings than concepts.
This project finds it most forceful statement in the writings of Nietzsche, where it became
the basis for his radical critique of Christianity and science. As is well known, Nietzsche posits a
sharp opposition between the Apollonian art of sculpture and the non-plastic Dionysian art of
music. The world of the intellect is Apollonian, and, he insists, has dominated Western
philosophy and culture since the time of Socrates. For the Apollonian, everything must be
intelligible to be beautiful. Nietzsche held the triumph of the Apollonian responsible for the ills
of Western culture. It spawned science, defined as “the belief in the explicability of nature and
in knowledge as a panacea.” Science and reason are “seductive distractions” that solidified
knowledge into constraining concepts that stifle creativity. The Enlightenment and nineteenth
century had greatly accelerated this process. For Nietzsche, the task of art is to interrogate and
undermine all perspectives to keep them from hardening into life-restricting concepts. He
advocates a project of liberation to distance oneself from the dominant values of the age, and
with it a self-cancelation [selbstaufhebung] of morals to attempt to regain the instinct of life. He
urges readers to “frolic in images” and recognize that creative life consists of replacing one set of
metaphors and illusions with another. Whereas Aristotle understood art as an imitation of nature,
for Nietzsche, it is “a metaphysical supplement, raised up beside it to overcome it.” Tragic art in
36 Schiller, " Die Götter Greichenlands," first published in Wieland's Der Teutsche Merkur in
1788.
37 Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp; Taylor, Hegel, pp. 17-10, 36-40.
38 Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Essays, 90
39 Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Fragmente 1-6 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1988), V, p. 41,
quoted in Bowie, "German Idealism and the Arts."
16
particular, creates and destroys its own illusions. In doing so, it destroys old dreams and makes
way for new ones.40
Nietzsche, like Kant and Schelling, understood that not all knowledge is accessible to
reason. The highest forms of wisdom, he maintained, are achieved by intuition, seeing and
feeling. This is what makes art and music so important. Language and the concepts its spawns
can never capture the cosmic symbolism of music because language itself is a symbol. It can
have superficial contact with music -- words can describe its structure, rhythm, instrumentation
and evolution -- but cannot disclose its innermost heart. That speaks to us directly, unmediated
by language.41 Intelligence beyond the intelligible finds expression in emotions, communal
solidarity and “oneness” with nature, all made possible by Dionysian ecstasy. Dionysian art
convinces us of the joy of existence, and we come to this realization by grasping the truth that
lies behind its representation. “We must have art,” Nietzsche implored, “lest we perish of the
truth” – by which he means the sterile truths of philosophy. Perhaps for this reason, Nietzsche
judged his own efforts to discover and convey wisdom to have failed. “How sad,” he lamented,
“that I did not attempt to say what I had to say as a poet.”42
Beauty and Suffering: German philosophy’s interest in tragedy as art was inseparable
from its conception of beauty. Here too Kant is central because he foregrounded the importance
for beauty and its relationship to ethics. Kant conceived of beauty as the non-conceptual
representation of a sensus communis. His successors went beyond him in rejecting bourgeois
conceptions of beauty. Art should not be pleasing and soothing, but arresting and disquieting,
40 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, sections 2, 18 and 23.
41 Ibid., sections 1 and 3; Kaufmann, Nietzsche; White, Metahistory, pp. 331-74.
42 Nietzsche, Will to Power, Aphorism 822. See also Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spake Zarathustra
and Human, All Too Human.
17
like Greek tragedy. Hegel, whom Heidegger called the last Greek, conceived of beauty as a
finite glimmer of the infinite.43 For Rilke, bourgeois beauty was stifling. It was “nothing but the
beginning of the terror that threatens to destroy us.”44 The emphasis on the darker side of beauty
reaches its apotheosis in Nietzsche, who was initially drawn to Wagner because of the latter’s
use of dissonance in his music. In Birth of Tragedy (1872), whose first edition was dedicated to
the Bayreuth composer, he called for the withdrawal of the beautiful from consideration in art.
To nineteenth century ears, musical dissonance was generally painful, which provided
another link to tragedy. Pain is a central feature of tragedy, and knowledge, as the chorus in
Agamemnon affirms, is won through suffering.45 Aristotle was also the first to theorize about
this connection. He argues in his Poetics that tragedy communicates knowledge by
simultaneously evoking fear and pity. This emotional state can bring about a catharsis: a purge
of the soul that restores its balance. Catharsis is a greatly diluted form of praxis, something akin
to an inoculation that gives us immunity by infecting us with a mild and tolerable form of a
pathogen. For Aristotle, the quintessential cathartic moment in tragedy comes when we see
ourselves as the blind Oedipus.46
Hölderlin is the first German to pick up on this theme. He declared true pain inspiring
and tragedy the highest art form because it celebrated suffering. Tragedy brings us knowledge
more through affect than reason, and emotions that take us outside of ourselves. Hölderlin
cryptically observes that Oedipus “has an eye too many perhaps.”47 His extra eye is presumably
43 Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit and Lectures on Fine Art; Schmidt, On Germans and