How Texts Fail to Support Traditional Theory

ὁ καιρὸς ηὑρῆσθαι τάδε. --  Sophocles

      In one of the last scenes leading up to Oedipus's act of discovery in Oedipus the King, he sends for the man who had saved him as an infant in Cithaeron while tending sheep.  Later, in the final recognition, a second individual will identify himself to be the one whom Jocasta had ordered  to expose the infant, and who out of pity gave it to the other man.  After the shepherd has been summoned, the chorus of Theban elders sings the following ode.  This example and a few others cast in serious doubt the most important conventions of theory.  Instead of acknowledging the meaning of these lines, albeit a difficult task, such a tradition ignores them.  

          May destiny still find me winning the praise of reverent purity in

          all words and [865] deeds sanctioned by those laws of sublime range,

          called into life through the high clear aether, whose father is Olympus

          alone. Their parent was no race of mortal men, [870] no, nor shall

          oblivion ever lay them to sleep: the god is mighty in them, and he does 

          not grow old.  Insolence breeds the tyrant. Insolence, once vainly

          stuffed with wealth [875] that is not proper or good for it, when it has

          scaled the topmost ramparts, is hurled to a dire doom, where one's feet

          cannot serve to good advantage. But I pray that the god never [880]

          quell such rivalry as benefits the state. I will always hold the god as

          our protector.  But if any man walks haughtily in deed or word, [885]

          with no fear of Justice, no reverence for the images of gods, may an

          evil doom seize him for his ill-starred pride, if he does not gain his

          advantage fairly, [890] or avoid unholy deeds, but seeks to lay profaning

          hands on sanctities. Where such things occur, what mortal shall boast

          any more that he can ward off the arrow of the gods from his life?

          [895] No.  For if such deeds are held in honor, why should we join in the

          sacred dance? 

Until the present point in the ode, the elders have said echoing Hesiod in Works and Days 238 f., that injustice or contention of any kind that does not “benefit the state” ought to be punished by the gods.  To that thought it is only added that “reverence for the images of the gods” is another duty going hand in hand with justice, so that piety is made relevant to the proper increase of human power and to justice.  And that is all.  For there is in the ode nothing yet about the context at hand, except the implication that the events now unfolding apply to the ethical concern for piety and proper respect to “sanctities.”  But then follows something else.  Why does the focus change?

          No longer will I go reverently to the earth's central and inviolate shrine, 

          no more to Abae's temple or to Olympia, [900] if these oracles do not

          fit the outcome, so that all mortals shall point at them with their fingers.

          [905] No, King—if this you are rightly called—Zeus all ruling, may it not

          escape you and your deathless power! The old prophecies concerning

          Laius are fading; already men give them no value, and nowhere is

          Apollo glorified with honors; [910] the worship of the gods is perishing.

      What, if anything, may be said about this chorus that has not been said before?  
Two claims -- the ones seen numbered shortly below -- should be seen as exploratory. 

      But before looking at those, it may be noted that Oedipus has no "hamartia" or "fault" in the sense of responsibility for his fate in any way, except for a certain confused impiety that he shares with both parents.   Jocasta too, herself intones a certain cheer at the prospect of defective oracles.   Oedipus, as Kenneth Burke would probably agree, represents, albeit only faintly, a continuation of those who have brought him to ruin.  Burke possessed only inchoately the foundational insight that pathos is secondary.  Pathos is not to be conflated with punishment or with effort.  It is only a reference to latent transgression or the consequence of others' sins who are now dead and gone.  That is Oedipus's condition and the meaning of his life.  

      Oedipus's experience is an allusion to the impiety of his father and of the human race.  Therefore, the significance of this drama, and essentially all others, can be understood only by a reduction to those implied conditions.

      (1) The mortals are generally, rather than only in this particular moment, disposed toward abandoning the gods as unreal or wishing to overthrow them -- which are two different possibilities. And (2) the more difficult claim is that this hostile relationship, in myth is not merely a representation, not merely an expression in the sense of "imitation" -- of a human thirst for power that one would naturally expect.  Rather, it is a hostility embedded inherently in myth, which human beings (or characters in myth) absorb, so to speak.  And its function is not so much to cure them of this kind of hostility, as it is to express a cure and freedom from those impulses that preexists as an innate balance in them, collectively.
      First the lighter claim (1) should be defended, both as to the broader scope of the statement, temporally, than initially appears, and also to the juxtaposition of active destruction of actual gods or apotheosis on the one hand, and on the other hand merely denying that gods exist.  For the "worship of the gods to perish" does initially appear to clash with the possibility that "oracles do not fit the outcome."  It is not just that god-existence follows necessarily from the pronouncement of an oracle or even belief in oracles, in fact it does not, at least not in the former case alone of mere pronouncement.  But in such a myth context the gods are assumed.   Nevertheless, there are two ways in which the inconsistency may be resolved.  Number one, it may be a rhetorical or non-literal reference to denial of the gods.   But number two, god-denial can be made to fit the context of myth, and furthermore, once that more compatible juxtaposition could be conceived, then it is easier to see god denial as one form of hubris or impiety among others.  That may in theory be pressed into a mythological narrative, even if such a narrative never depicted the refutation of gods.  
      It is useful, however, to the present purpose to resolve the foregoing difficulty, because in that case it is possible to see the utterance of the chorus as not confined to the moment and to the Oedipus story alone. That brings us to the other question, of breadth in time.  There is a tendency, seemingly of the old way of looking at this passage, to view the chorus's admonishment as belonging to the moment, to the matter at hand only.  That view does seem natural, because this precise worry is not often expressed in the myths, that the gods must seriously carry out this particular prophecy in order to reinforce belief and worship.  But the problem with this is that there are too many other examples that generally parallel the present one, at least sharing the impression that the mortals are pervasively disposed to god-destruction or unbelief.
      It ought not to be denied that the chorus and other characters can think of the curse of Oedipus not being fulfilled and "this cup passing" from him, so to speak, even with gods believed in. That is not contrary to sense.   They can think of the curse as a bluff, without thinking necessarily of the gods' existence as a bluff, a deceptive dream.   Nevertheless, there is a sense in which the chorus does not question the oracle at all. Rather, to a certain extent it seems to expect the fulfillment of Oedipus's ruin as a given.
      The chorus gives the impression that the impiety it is worried about is a thing of the moment, a recent catastrophe plaguing the world and belief in gods.  But that impression is very odd -- and it does not, arguably, withstand scrutiny.  A more true or solid impression is that those hostile mortal attitudes are perennial.  That, however being the case, the theories of myth and literature as we know them stand unequipped, or in a way silent, without an adequate explanation for the text.   Specifically, the chorus's impression that a crisis of the gods belongs to the moment tends to reinforce the more paltry view of the situation, namely, that the ultimate role of the divine punishments being administered is merely to directly, to consciously discipline mankind.  That too, despite its clarity and simplicity, is a problematic view.   As an alternative that tries to remedy, to address these problems, the aforementioned second numbered claim, about what the actual meaning could be of opposition to the gods in myth, could be argued in the following way.
      The gods are, at times, depicted as punishing the mortals randomly and arbitrarily, except that the greatest terror is visited upon Oedipus because of the crime of his father, that is, the rape of Chrysippus.  This is no speculation about literature but was the standard narrative of Oedipus, as described of the Laius cyclical poem and its dramatization in Aeschylus.  Both Laius and Oedipus, however, even after they have both suffered an imprecation, continue to deny the validity of this punishment even after it has been reduced by only a part; thus, after Oedipus learns that Polybus is dead, he is determined to avoid his putative mother Merope (Oedipus Tyrannus l.985).   But why this disrespect?  It is not by mere naivete that the mortal thus conducts himself, but they do so because it is, truth be told, their wish to rid themselves of the gods either as real or unreal beings.   As the gods are believed in or dreamed, they are only partly objects of piety and benign worship, whereas they bear a constant amount of cloaked hostility from the believer, necessarily ingrained in belief and worship.  But the deepest reason--the essential reason--why this strange, integrated balance is maintained at all, is pragmatic and a matter of survival in the real world.  It is, then, through the mythological image of the reversal of such piety, that humankind expresses an adjustment to reality.   It is through the dreamed image of mortals approaching the gods with desire, hatred and murderous ambition, and by a certain immunity in ingesting these sanctioned or unacceptable impulses in a subtle dose.
      On this view, if there is ever belief in "the gods," in a sense comparable to these classical myths, it arises as this expression, not of direct fear or obedience, but rather an unconscious conditioning, or adjustment to reality.  As a result, some sort of healthy, collective restraint is thus enabled in mankind. The antagonism of mortals towards gods as depicted in myth does not seem to arise, then, out of the moment or a whim, or seem to be a sudden conflict that the gods newly encounter.  Rather, it seems to arise out of a more subtle adjustment to "reality."  What we mean by that reality is, mainly, or one might suggest, the comportment of mankind to actual nature and to others.  And there is an analogous phenomenon of humor, pertaining instead to society.
      Of course, this is hardly the place to go into or repeat further details of the humor analogy.   But the analogy is more difficult to communicate or defend, without also adding that part of what makes humor cheerful is not merely the accomplished adjustment itself, which constitutes a happy disposition.   Rather, part of that cheerfulness of a humor response comes from the image of the sort of self-deceived, careless mind that is not itself in control of such emotions as laughter.  This is why humor is not only a deception-curing act but a self-restraining act.  Just as solitary laughter is proscribed, so would be an excess of laughter.  But in either the humorous case or the mythical, the adjustment is accomplished by the ingestion, in a curiously viral sense, of the image of a thwarted violation of that reality.
     There is another, later passage, again suggesting something other than contingent hope or admonishment that the prophecies should come to pass, for example as a banal warning or conscious injunction.  This is the later ode recited at the very point of completion of the reversal of fortune for Oedipus.   Peripeteia, incidentally, now usually has the more generic sense of reversal of fortune.  It does not have the more specific irony-based meaning found in Aristotle, pertaining to the fact that what destroys Oedipus is that a servant, the messenger, chooses with good intentions to get entangled with him, thus inadvertently upsetting the whole deception. 
 

Chorus

Alas, generations of mortals, how mere a shadow I count your life! Where,   where is the mortal who [1190] attains a happiness which is more than apparent and doomed to fall away to nothing? Your fate warns me—yours, unhappy Oedipus—to call no [1195] earthly creature blessed.

This more concise statement follows as an afterthought, a mere reiteration, yet it tends to confirm and drive home the more than superficial impression of what appear as words of justification, of consolation earlier in the ode of 865-910.   This more terse ode declaration, that the purpose of Oedipus’s fate is in some sense a warning, in the first place, may not be understood as at bottom a statement of that fact, that the essential reason for Oedipus's fate is to inform and terrorize mankind into respect for and belief in the gods.  Both the story from the audience's view, and also within from the point of view of characters, certainly can be read as a direct warning whose function is to inspire and enforce piety.  

      We might repeat part of the previous argument against the factual-warning interpretation, and add another reason.  The problem already suggested with such a reading is that human hostility towards the gods, unbelief, etc. and the like, are in this mythic situation something of a banality.   And if that is the case, this particular statement, that "your fate warns me," does not necessarily or with certainty appear as having the effect of god restoration, or as needing to have that effect.   Being already and ever present, that hostility and the gods’ violent policies towards it, call for a deeper explanation.   Looked at another way, the chorus's foreboding words do not do much except affirm that the mortals greatly desire not only to deny the gods exist, but even to take their place and become gods.   But if the Oedipus legend as nothing but a contingent warning is untenable, all that remains is this alternative.    

      Besides having a potential explanatory significance, does the latter part of the l. 875 ode raise other questions?   What might it imply about the three other Greek figures slain by a son or grandson:  Aegeus, Acrisius (grandson, Perseus), and Catreus?   But there are more pertinent examples than those, better because they go beyond the narrow problematic of parricide to embed the theme of impiety in other scenes.  

      But before multiplying examples, we should be prepared to close the door to a number of other rebuttable proposals to explain Oedipus’s fate, and to call for a moratorium on the most obscure attempts, such as that “Oedipus’s lineage is saturated” (Bollack).   Again, 900-910 of the ode explains what the dramatist thinks is the meaning not only of Oedipus but of all heroic annihilation in myth.  It exists for reasons not dissimilar to the very existence of human sacrifice.  The gods, already concocting plans to liquidate humanity for reasons that are impossible for mankind to remedy, in addition to those plans, are constantly on duty to check mankind with terrible portents, quite arbitrarily.  According to the viewpoint, looked at only superficially, of the chorus of Oedipus the King, even if humanity is capable of a high collective moral output, it is a fact that humanity has its eye on the gods and is from the beginning questioning their existence or need to exist.   Such stories, to clarify again our thesis, like all the myths about the gods, together in an integral way express a mental adjustment to reality. This adjustment is innate to humanity and can only be attenuated, erased or annihilated—if it may at all—with complete eradication of belief in gods of any kind. But there is not space here to treat that question yet.             

      The human hero is for a while experimented with as the victim of metamorphosis.  But this is only a game, and he is too small and weak to endure unending physical torture as may a god or Titan without arousing terror and disgust in the gods themselves.  The fact that there is such a scale of intensity by no means implies that tragedy’s meaning is found within the intensity or moral effect of viewer’s reaction.  But these failed options leave only parricide and murder as the central torture of the human race.  Thus having explained divine retribution as dependent on a needful and integrated impiety in myth, this point suggests reasons for the specific nature of punishment.

      There is another doubtful novel view that the meaning of the Greek myths of hubris is that they are simply dreams that prophesy the ultimate success of atheism and the furthest, and most destructive, advances of science.  In Oedipus, Philosopher, Jean-Joseph Goux considers this thesis, and tries to reject it on the grounds that there is insufficient terror and tragedy in modernity, after all.   But that is a weak response.  On the prophesy theory the central mythic parricide of Oedipus has a more allegorical sense, as Goux himself acknowledged, with Laius as god and Jocasta as Earth.  But the problem with this view is that mortal-against-god assault, followed by a curse or local punishment or a global cataclysm, is not culturally relative.  Yet what is relative is the cosmologically malignant culture.  Therefore, cosmological human malevolence is disconnected from the drama of warfare and punishment between gods and mortals.  Only the latter is universal.  Although ancient religions would not make such a claim about modern civilization, somewhere in their mythology is included the punishment of an assault on gods by beings who are far below them in rank.

      Until a certain point, the gods need to slay their immediate progenitors.  Initially the gods have a series of fathers, who, being immortal, must be deposed yet can only be by murder.  But human murder is at the same time a painful affirmation of the Silenic truth that man ought not to exist at all, even as it is also a personal loss, while to be responsible for this act is the greatest guilt—thus combining the three greatest pains into one which are appropriate.               

      Nietzsche does discuss the chorus concept in The Birth of Tragedy, especially in order to explain its origin as the first actor.  But most of what Nietzsche says about “the Dionysian” aligns that concept with principles of reality and human pathos.  When he seeks to add to the Dionysian a choric element, we are told little more than that it embodies a “Dionysian wisdom.”  What does that mean?  This account, while it is passionate and near the mark, is finally vague.   All it tells us is that the chorus is in the realm of profundity, pathos, and the structural origins of drama.  It is a truism that the chorus embodies a serious attitude toward the action, the gods and the ancient structure of drama as chorus itself, prior to later developments.   

     There are other examples that refer to warnings from the gods.  But those are all collectively explained by the same argument already put forth, such as this in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon.

          Chorus

But a man's blood, once it has first fallen by murder to earth [1020] in a dark tide—who by magic spell shall call it back?  Even he who possessed the skill to raise from the dead—did not Zeus make an end of him as warning? [1025] And unless one fate ordained of the gods restrains another fate from winning the advantage, my heart would outstrip my tongue and pour forth its fears; [1030] but, as it is, it mutters only in the dark, distressed and hopeless ever to unravel anything in time when my soul's aflame.

Rather than attempting to see any more confirmation in that sort of passage, if there is anything to be gained it may instead be found from another angle.  One may attempt to show more definitively what we have now only inferred.  Namely, that is the premise that mortals in fact, and also as depicted in myth, vigorously desire to destroy the gods, stop believing in them, or even take their place, and quite probably the last of these.   But is that not undeniably shown here, in Euripides’s The Suppliants?

Theseus

[195] Full often have I argued out this subject with others. For there are those who say, there is more bad than good in human nature; but I hold a contrary view, that good over bad predominates in man, [200] for if it were not so, we should not exist. He has my praise, whichever god brought us to live by rule from chaos and from brutishness, first by implanting reason, and next by giving us a tongue to declare our thoughts, so as to know the meaning of what is said, [205] and bestowing fruitful crops, and drops of rain from heaven to make them grow, with which to nourish earth's fruits and to water her lap; and more than this, protection from the wintry storm, and means to ward from us the sun-god's scorching heat; the art of sailing over the sea, so that we might exchange [210] with one another whatever our countries lack. And where sight fails us and our knowledge is not sure, the seer foretells by gazing on the flame, by reading signs in folds of entrails, or by divination from the flight of birds. Are we not then too proud, when heaven has made such [215] preparation for our life, not to be content with it? But our presumption seeks to lord it over heaven, and in the pride of our hearts we think we are wiser than the gods.  

      The prosecution rests, with only minor emendations.   Traditional literary theory stands condemned.  The mortals, in myth and in reality want to and will destroy the gods if they can, while more precisely, they exhibit that impulse more overtly in the myths themselves because the myths are unreal, and are expressions of adjustment from the point of view of actual life. What is less clear, is whether those human beings who dwell in this later time of more advanced awareness and violence toward god and nature are in fact more advanced haters of gods.  Their sophisticated position of power, bereft of cosmology or sense of comforting enclosure, says nothing necessarily about how their feelings toward gods are generally affected.  And they engage in a conservative resuscitation of various forms of religion, which themselves are not easily compared with the religion inhabiting a cosmological world, a religion of naïve acceptance or dependence on gods without the taint of “faith.”
      But it is submitted that the human expressions of rage against the gods, perennial or not, and its inevitable punishment are not in essence (1) a paltry, factual warning, (2) a prophecy, (3) another kind of disciplinary device, or any of the other candidates advanced hitherto.  There are other proposals that simply do not break the sphere of any universal meaning of tragedy or of myth, such as the so-called tragic theme of equal and opposing ethical claims.   But that notion remains uninfluential, of tragedy as an individual or family in opposition to a state.  Such is, if in any way seen as applying broadly, not something of the essence but a profound connection of tragedy to forces and relationships that are, in a more pragmatic, concrete sense, of historical importance.
     Tragedy has a general meaning that pervades its every textual fiber and is no “grandiose" or "facile" "generalization.”  It has an ultimate and ever-present meaning that does not get beyond that of myth.  And that can only be an expression of adjustment to reality in the sense that to ingest, imitate, and absorb the image of unrestraint in the proper way is the condition of cultural restraint, as a certain sense of immunity is seen to operate.  There is a perfect analogy in humor and comedy where absorption of the image of a more purely individual presumption on a smaller, purely human social scale is what it means to produce or appreciate humor.  The image of presumption thus ingested in ambivalent, viral form is the essence of humor, and has as its sole primary purpose the analogous expression of adjustment to our own society.  

Unknowing Epigone of Aristotle

      Let's look at this from another perspective.  An autocratic rejection of the ancient literary theorist has already been recently made. The person above right, in The Birth of Tragedy, does not attack Aristotle, who he once writes "deserves the highest honors."  Instead he prepares for that ambition by declaring in TBOT, which far predates his criticism of Aristotle, that tragedy is "Dionysian."  The Olympian gods represent reason and lack of passion that imprison the Dionysian or its Silenic truth beneath a mountain.  The gods also embody this imprisonment, which is incomplete and contradictory, while tragedy both develops (evolving from Dionyisian and Apollonian visions interacting) and is understood through this process of restraint.  Drama is a vision of these two gods and of nature.  Countless exegeses and even literary creations have been based on this thesis.  Its inception in a book echoes the restraint theme by being the work of a young man who attacks research and philology while still a scholar.  He never ceases that critique after he leaves academe not freely but ostensibly for health reasons.
      Even before going into what Nietzsche consciously believes about catharsis, already his Dionysian concept is, looked at in one way, another name for the self-deception principle as it applies to tragedy, other literature or life.  Dionysos is representative of self-deception even though the cause of that deception is unhappiness due to a real lack of power, to be endured by forgetting reality and lashing out at the gods, who are themselves "so slight and unreal."  The reality he represents is rebellious desire.  He is hidden from view, outwardly to defend him from stronger assailants, but possibly to give insidious hope to his own destructive power, probably the hope of all the gods themselves as infants.  Instead of accepting reality, or what appears to be reality -- individuation and the world--the Dionysian dissolves individuation and also places the real as an external object to be assaulted and overpowered.    

      The Apollonian, conversely, is the principle of individuation, and precisely thereby the real as "re-al."  But re-ality in this sense does not, moreover, necessarily mean a metaphysical reality, no doubt a likely objection.  Apollo is the god rendered a love object and thus embodies a false vision.  Thus it may be argued, or will likely be objected, that this improbably neat and too systematic, associative distinction of the two gods falls apart.  That is especially so, if the gods are the ultimate, primal fiction and deception. There is something real about the gods even as their absence, or their unreality, motivates and causes hubris and self-destruction.  Or they are in a sense real if, as may be the case, their image is not in principle unrealistic.  This possibility explains why, more and more at the present moment, the world threatens to unleash dangerous and uncertain "prosthetic gods."  Even the promulgation of these words without use of paper is one of those prosthetics.

      Wine in this context may be understood as a falsification of a celestial drink or as corrupted in human hands, while any elixir of the sort is like the pharmakon, poison-medicine.  But whichever god signifies reality or unreality, still Nietzsche in this instance has only colored the concepts of tragedy but not touched their meaning.  (What is meant by the Primal Unity, however, is again the real, yet must not be immediately confused with "real" in the sense of an object such as the god.   It is instead the human sense of forbidden contact with reality.  But that is a sense of real or reality that includes gods, so that, ultimately, it is hardly possible to distinguish Primal Unity from any imperceptible or ubiquitous unity, or any terrible object of desire).    
      Looked at another way, Nietzsche distorts the problematic of human hubris, which he himself loosely invokes in his later works, into a question of mere human happiness, power and health.  Hubris is the Dionysian as a certain health and decency enabled by a tension between real and unreal, the drawn bow of vitality.  While he says little about it, what is at stake in hubris, for Nietzsche, could only be the question whether it is somehow permitted to flourish, or whether it is suppressed.  If the former, then the more is it permitted to benefit by making stronger, and if the latter, it is renounced ascetically so that its benefit is discarded, risking mass degeneration and the final implosion of culture.  Unfortunately for this position, however, the notion that we tolerate drama or tragedy in order either to express or to acquire strength for our own hardships, is simply untrue and counterintuitive.  Nietzsche's account of hubris is finally pragmatic and shallow, having no true aesthetic or symbolic force whatever.
      It is in finally coming to speak of Aristotle on this subject, that Nietzsche implies the above absurd hypothesis that art actually inures us to the pains of life.  He first postulates that tragedy is a "stimulant," an "intoxication with life," and a "tonic."  He means to dissmiss Aristotle's theory and without even worrying about what the latter means by "a catharsis [ton pathematon] of these emotions."  Nietzsche cuts this knot by responding that tragic contemplation is not catharsis at all and instead its sorrow edifies directly as harshness.  Its effect is to awaken from delusions of comfort, and to celebrate and affirm nature as terrible and as comprised of differences of power. It is a pure "yes" as long as this affirmation does not degenerate into shallow and uninformed consent.
     Nietzsche thus understands tragedy as a "tonic," not remedying itself, but being consumed for what it is.  It invigorates directly, just as he writes elsewhere that "what does not kill me makes me stronger."  But that does not part with Aristotle, since it is still to see pathos for both audience and audited as a contingent component of the work, and consequently as something to be investigated independently or on its own terms.  It is to see pathos as an anomaly, a strange enjoyment of evil, while it is no such thing.  There are "tonic" elements, there is hubris even against the gods themselves, toxic tears and wails of ecstatic grief, there is the intoxicating idea and image of death.  Nietzsche is right that neither these things, nor the main moment of recognition actually purges the audience except either in the most paltry or metaphorical sense.  
      He is probably also right not to condescend to ponder what Aristotle even means by such purging, as do the scholars of our time.  Some of the novel interpretations that have been proposed are silly and never influential, for example, that "these emotions" means a class of emotions.  He is not mistaken that there is in tragedy something like a patience for and delight in the terrible as one relishes harsh winters or daunting, unlikely tasks.  He would not have us join those who now ask endlessly, "why do we like the terrible in tragedy, why do we like suffering?"  The idle pertinacity of that drone now verges on madness.  Will we go where madness lies?  And finally it is commendable that in enforcing the taste for the terrible as strength, he momentarily reverses the normal direction of theory, implying that what might matter is what art expresses and not what it brings about.  But that is so very slight that he cannot be credited for it.   
       Kenneth Burke (1897-1993), above left may be seen as a more complex case.  His wish to depart from Aristotle is so unclear and hastily designed that it collapses into what looks like probable insomnia and depression.  Burke is the first to recognize that pathos is not to be explained, justified, given purpose, but is rather a secondary and signifying feature.  But he does not follow through from this one gigantic step; his brief flash of precious brilliance never blossoms into the complete explanation that is implied. "What is it about Aristotle?" this master of rhetoric seems to say.  Why may I not get around this?  Instead he asserts trivially that tragedy is "homeopathic" because the audience responds to suffering with the same, and comedy is allopathic because suffering is viewed painlessly.       

The Culture Built on Sand

A claim like this blog's title might better be posed as a question.  Evidence may be brought to bear and then inquiry made, Has such an age truly passed?   But there is not a need to give things a permanent heading of uncertainty.  Why refer to the topic as aesthetics? But there is nothing new about calling every kind of art's theory by that term.  Now there are several general terms for art that jar equally with concerns for particulars.  But only one of them, namely "aesthetics," while it signifies what is indisputable in the sensory basis of art, goes beyond that connotation to invoke a certain doctrine that derives from art rightly understood as satisfaction. This is the underlying hazard or fault, though latent and inadvertent, in the word aesthetics.  While art as satisfaction is trivial or axiomatic (for example, in form and in representation), it reinforces the convention that the highest art is a mere fact, since it is in truth dissatisfaction as the tragic.  If that condition only exists to speak for itself, it renders "theory" nonexistent.  And should one wish to transform that negative into a positive, asserting that therefore art requires no adornment as theory, the reply is that it is not theory that adorns, rather it explains.  Whereas, since the reaction to art does not itself explain, and need not even occur at all but only must be seen in art itself, it is in fact adornment.   In comparison to much of the appropriate viewers' response to them, the dramatis personae in their own disposition seem almost stoical.   

Those who bring to light neglected or poorly understood minds surely recover important evidence and insight.  "Then, Brutus, I have much mistook your passion."  (Julius Caesar, 1.2.48)  To mistake the contents of the fictional souls is a great false step and frequently committed.  And those artifactual minds are themselves mental effects, analogous to those of the viewer.  But the syndrome that has ruined theory is to mistake our own reaction to the work, more specifically the further effects and especially the negative quality of that reaction in the tragic, for the meaning of the work.  There are many things mistaken about this, the most basic being the wedge that is driven between art and us.   Art thus becomes adornment by being supplemented and constituted by the audience, and implicitly, no less importantly, the work is thereby trivialized from within as the conceptual isolation of the minds and pathos of characters.  On the contrary, the reality of art is that purpose, origin, and reaction are one and operate as a unit. Reaction and pathos are, as Kenneth Burke rightly suspected, no more than expressive intensifications of effort.  After all, reactions are not always necessary.  

Our reaction, which cannot be better described than as a subtle chastisement, is in the old convention of theory seen as inessential to the work as it appears. But it would thus be essential for the purpose of the work's fulfillment and explanation.  In this kind of thinking, our reaction happens to the work and makes it more perfect, since it is seen as ultimate meaning.  On the contrary, art's existence conforms with the broader sense that nature is "from the beginning beautiful." On the one hand, that seems axiomatic for art, that there ought to be nothing after it which fulfills it by being a functional effect.  But it is also true in fact, that not much exists that we would call effects of that sort.  
 
The response of pathos not only merges with the work, but it is not explanation in the sense of fulfilled purpose.  Rather, it is an extenstion of the work or thing to be explained, not as explanation of its quality as happy or sad but as signification of what the whole work expresses.  The audience or reader is not privileged in the sense of being an extra component.  This is the Copernican Revolution of theory, that pathos is peripheral.  It merely builds on the meaning of laughter and comedy.

While it is a truism that art does not have a raison d'etre, its true sense of essential cause is an efficient or generative cause, not consequence-based. Through humanity nature is compelled not merely to imitate itself, or express any profound or superficial virtue.  Rather, it expresses truth through an explosion of restrained falsehood and infidelity.  This auto-immunization in nature is the cause of, and therefore the main theoretical meaning of art or literature.  Art's nature or essence thus consists in this faithfulness of nature to itself.   But that does not mean the expression of the particular condition of the writer or artist.

Theory has hitherto always turned art on its head, putting ourselves in the position of the work and its being.  
 
The same strange attitude emerges even in a visual aesthetics of the rebellious sort that, too hastily and bluntly but with good cause, shuns historians and history.  That kind of "critical" philosopher whose principle is to view the work as pure, universal or unshackled from contexts, remains in a "theory" that is, at bottom, still one of effects.  It is a theory of art as containing an inner message of that inherent negation of interest that plays on the surface in the more rudimentary aspect of the same theory.  The radical, the enigmatic or radically darkened is still effect-based even insofar as there is never any actual effect, as it retreats forever.  

Aesthetics, especially as it echoes what has been promulgated about literature and narratives, is a theory of effects rather than origins.   Such an approach lacks an appropriate sense of necessity or even purpose.  And that is ironic, if it is purported by a thinker who invented a philosophy of purpose, or telos.  

To define art or literature in terms of its effect is flat and incidental.  It is to give the effects undue attention as requiring explanation, but to deny them their appropriate attention for what they signify.  It does not break the theoretical plane.