Greek Tragedy

Kierkegaard wants us to attempt to understand the worldview, or the underlying framework of beliefs and ideas, of our Greek ancestors. Our approach here is to study the Greek tragedy as an art form, and compare it to the modern tragic structure. The central action of ancient tragedy emits not from the decisions of characters, but from the motion of greater events. The ancient world possessed a sense of subjectivity that was not yet fully conscious of itself, not yet capable of reflecting on itself to the point where the plot can be driven primarily by dialogue between characters. The ancient hero exists only in the context of their epic foreground and their cultural heritage, whereas the modern hero stands and falls on his own deeds.

Although we’re blind to it, the modern age has exchanged tragic destiny for subjectivity and individuality. In making the modern hero accountable for the totality of the events in his own life, we transform his aesthetic guilt into ethical guilt. What used to be a “tragic hero” can be seen as a “inadequate person”, now that we consider ourselves judges of what is ethical. The ambiguous innocence of tragic guilt is lost when we make ourselves the masters of our own existence.

In losing our old idea of the tragic, we have gained despair. The tragic holds a sadness and a healing power which should not be despised. When one wants to gain oneself in the larger-than-life manner of our age, one loses oneself and becomes comical. The tragic contains an infinite leniency, from the human point of view it is really where we find divine love and mercy.

“In ancient tragedy, the sorrow is deeper, the pain less; in modern tragedy, the pain is greater, the sorrow less.”

We are not playing semantic games when we ask: How do we differentiate pain from sorrow? Pain indicates a reflection on suffering which sorrow does not know. A child sees the suffering of an old person, yet lacks the conception of sin and guilt necessary for the sorrow to develop to pain. An adult capable of reflection who sees a child suffer feels comparatively little sorrow and great pain; the adult asks why it cannot be otherwise, and finds no answer. The modern hero suffers all his guilt, he is transparent to himself in his own suffering of his guilt.

Our age, in allowing the individual to act as his own creator, transforms his ethereal sorrow to ethical guilt and remorse. The power from which the suffering comes has lost its meaning, all that’s left is to cry “Heaven helps those who help themselves!”. Kierkegaard argues that our age is deeper in despair than ancient Greece, as we are “melancholy enough to realize that there is something called responsibility and that it has some significance.”

We can take a closer look at the the words we’re interested in: Sorrow is similar to grief, both words are commonly associated with death and mourning. The Bible explains sorrow as something essential and natural which results from exposure to evil and sin. Anxiety is similar to dread, commonly associated with the uncertainty of the future. The Bible explains anxiety as something unnecessary which results from a lack of faith.

“Anxiety is a reflection, and in this it differs essentially from sorrow. Anxiety is the organ through which the subject appropriates sorrow and assimilates it. Anxiety is the energy of the movement by which sorrow bores its way into the heart.”

From my perspective, the disagreement at the root of all this confusion concerns the necessity of suffering. Have you ever heard the term “radical acceptance”? The fact that we see this as something distinct from surrender/resignation is significant. I believe the ancient Greeks would have been mighty confused by this distinction. This is because their radical acceptance was presupposed, prepackaged into their worldview. We do not have this luxury, we stole it from ourselves, and now we are blind to the nuance of the implicit existential Greek surrender. It is not impossible for us to reclaim this nuance, but we’ll have to wait for a second Renaissance.

The reflective nature of anxiety can be seen in the very language we use. We are always “anxious about something” - the anxiety is separated from the thing that makes us anxious. When we say “our sorrow”, we express what we sorrow over at the same time as our sorrow over it.