Let’s now imagine that one great Cyclops eye of Socrates focussed on tragedy, that eye in which the beautiful madness of artistic enthusiasm never glowed — let’s imagine how it was impossible for that eye to peer into the Dionysian abyss with a feeling of pleasure.1 What must that eye have actually seen in the “lofty and highly praised” tragic art, as Plato calls it? Something really unreasonable — causes without effects and effects which appeared to have no causes, and the whole so confused and with so many different elements that any reasonable disposition had to reject it, but dangerous tinder for sensitive and susceptible souls. We know which single form of poetry Socrates understood: Aesop’s fables, and he certainly did so with that smiling complacency with which the noble and good Gellert in his fable of the bee and the hen sings the praises of poetry:

You see in me the use of poetry—
To tell the man without much sense
A picture image of the truth of things.2

But for Socrates tragic art did not seem “to speak the truth” at all, quite apart from the fact that it addressed itself to the man who “does not possess much sense,” and thus not to philosophers, a double excuse to keep one’s distance from it. Like Plato, he assigned it to the arts of cosmetics, which present only what is pleasant, not what is useful, and he therefore made the demand that his disciples abstain and strictly stay away from such unphilosophical temptations, with so much success that the youthful poet of tragedy, Plato, immediately burned his poetical writing, so that he could become Socrates’ student. But where invincible talents fought against the Socratic instructions, his power, together with the force of that immense personality, was still great enough to force poetry itself into new attitudes, unknown up until then.

An example of this is Plato himself. To be sure, in his condemnation of tragedy and art in general he did not remain back behind the naive cynicism of his master. But completely from artistic necessity he had to create an art form inwardly related to the existing art forms which he had rejected. The major criticism which Plato had made about the older art — that it was the imitation of an illusion and thus belonged to an even lower level than the empirical world — must above all not be directed against the new work of art. And so we see Plato exerting himself to go beyond reality and to present the Idea which forms the basis of that pseudo-reality.1

With that, however, Plato the thinker reached by a detour the very place where, as a poet, he had always been at home and from where Sophocles and all the older art was solemnly protesting against Plato’s criticism. If tragedy had assimilated into itself all earlier forms of art, so the same again holds true, in an odd way, for the Platonic dialogue, which was created from a mixture of all available styles and forms and hovers between explanation, lyric, drama, between prose and poetry, right in the middle, and in so doing broke through the strict old law about the unity of stylistic form. The Cynic writers went even further along the same path. In the excessive garishness of their style, in their weaving back and forth between prose and metrical forms, they produced the literary image of “raving Socrates,” which they were in the habit of depicting in their own lives.2

The Platonic dialogue was, so to speak, the boat on which the shipwreck of the older poetry, along with all its children, was saved. Pushed together into a single narrow space and with Socrates at the helm they anxiously and humbly set off now into a new world, which never could get its fill of looking at fantastic images of this procession. Plato truly gave all future generations the image of a new form of art, the image of the novel , which can be characterized as an infinitely intensified Aesopian fable, in which poetry lived on with a relative priority to dialectical philosophy similar to the relative priority of that very philosophy to theology for many centuries, that is, as ancilla [subservient maid] . This was poetry’s new position, the place into which Plato forced it under the pressure of the daemonic Socrates.

Now philosophical ideas grew up around art and forced it to cling closely to the trunk of dialectic. The Apollonian attitude metamorphosed into logical systematizing, just as we noticed something similar with Euripides and, in addition, the Dionysian was transformed into naturalistic emotions. Socrates, the dialectical hero in Platonic drama, reminds us of the changed nature of the Euripidean hero, who has to defend his actions with reasons and counter-reasons and thus frequently runs the risk of losing our tragic sympathy. For who can fail to recognize the optimistic element in the heart of dialectic, which celebrates a jubilee with every conclusion and can breathe only in cool brightness and consciousness, that optimistic element which, once it has penetrated tragedy, must gradually overrun its Dionysian regions and necessarily drive them to self-destruction — right to their death leap into middle-class drama. Let people merely recall the consequences of the Socratic sayings “Virtue is knowledge; sin arises only from ignorance; the virtuous person is the happy person”: in these three basic forms of optimism lies the death of tragedy. For now the virtuous hero must be a dialectician; now there must be a necessarily perceptible link between virtue and knowledge, belief and morality; now the transcendental resolution of justice in Aeschylus is lowered to the flat and impertinent principle of “poetic justice” with its customary deus ex machina.

What does this new Socratic optimistic stage world look like now with respect to the chorus and the whole musical-Dionysian basis for tragedy in general? As something accidental, as a reminder of the origin of tragedy, which we can well do without. We, by contrast, have come to realize that the chorus can only be understood as the origin of tragedy and of the tragic in general. Already with Sophocles the issue of the chorus reveals something of an embarrassment — an important indication that even with him the Dionysian stage of tragedy is beginning to fall apart. He no longer dares to trust the chorus to carry the major share of the action, but limits its role to such an extent that it now appears almost coordinated with the actors, just as if it had been lifted up out of the orchestra into the scene. This feature naturally destroys its nature completely, no matter how much Aristotle may have approved of this particular arrangement of the chorus.

That displacement of the chorus, which Sophocles certainly recommended through his dramatic practice and, according to tradition, even in a written text, is the first step toward the destruction of the chorus, whose phases in Euripides, Agathon, and the New Comedy followed with breakneck speed, one after the other. Optimistic dialectic, with its syllogistic whip, drove music out of tragedy, that is, it destroyed the essence of tragedy, which can be interpreted only as a manifestation and representation of Dionysian states, as a perceptible symbolizing of music, as the dream world of a Dionysian intoxication.

If we have thus noticed an anti-Dionysian tendency already effective even before Socrates, which only in him achieves incredible, brilliant expression, then we must not shrink from the question of where such a phenomenon as Socrates points to. For we are not in a position, given the Platonic dialogues, to see that phenomenon merely as a negative force of dissolution. And so, while it’s true that the most immediate effect of the Socratic drive was to bring about the subversion of Dionysian tragedy, a profound living experience of Socrates himself forces us to the question whether there must necessarily be only an antithetical relationship between Socratism and art and whether the birth of an “artistic Socrates” is in general an inherent contradiction.

For where art is concerned, that despotic logician now and then had the feeling of a gap, of an emptiness, of a partial reproach, of a duty he had perhaps neglected. As he explains to his friends in prison, often one and the same dream apparition came to him, always with the same words, “Socrates, practise music!”1 He calmed himself, right up to his last days, with the interpretation that his practice of philosophy was the highest musical art and believed that it was incorrect that a divinity would remind him of “common, popular music.” Finally in prison, in order to relieve his conscience completely, he agreed to practice that music, something he had considered insignificant. And in this mood, he composed a poem to Apollo and rendered a few of Aesop’s fables in verse. What drove him to this practice was something like the voice of his warning daemon: it was his Apollonian insight that, like a barbarian king, he did not understand a noble divine image and was in danger of sinning against a divinity — through his failure to understand. That statement of Socrates’s dream vision is the single indication of his thinking about something perhaps beyond the borders of his logical nature. So he had to ask himself: Is something which I do not understand not also something incomprehensible? Perhaps there is a kingdom of wisdom which is forbidden to the logician? Perhaps art is even a necessary
correlative and supplement to scientific understanding?

Footnotes:
1Cyclops : In Greek mythology a cyclops was a huge, one-eyed, cannibal monster living in the wilderness.

2Gellert : Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715-1769), German poet and professor of philosophy, famous for his moralistic fables. Aesop: a sixth century BC Greek writer, by tradition a slave, who is known only for the moralistic tales which bear his name.

1In Plato’s theory of knowledge, reality is ideal and can be apprehended only through the intellect, not through the senses. The sensible world around us contains copies of that ideal reality (empirical objects copy or participate in the Idea of the object).

2The Cynic writers : The Cynics, an important school of philosophy in the fifth century BC, encouraged a moral life free of material wealth.

1This story is mentioned in Plato’s Phaedo.