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.