Counter-Currents
  • Private Events
  • T&C
  • Rss
  • DLive
  • Telegram
  • Gab
  • Entropy
  • Rss
  • DLive
  • Telegram
  • Gab
  • Entropy
  • Webzine
  • Books
  • Podcasts
  • Donate
  • Paywall
  • Crypto
  • Mailing List
  • About
  • Contact
  • RSS
    • Main feed
    • Comments feed
    • Podcast feed

LEVEL2

  • Webzine
  • Books
  • Podcasts
  • Donate
  • Paywall
  • Crypto
  • Mailing List
  • About
  • Contact
  • RSS
    • Main feed
    • Comments feed
    • Podcast feed
  • Private Events
  • T&C
  • Rss
  • DLive
  • Telegram
  • Gab
  • Entropy
Print November 1, 2021

The Metaphysics of Tragedy

Alexander Jacob

Leopold Ziegler

6,157 words

Leopold Ziegler (1881-1958) was a German philosopher who was steeped in the philosophy of the Will of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and in the philosophy of the Unconscious of the Schopenhauerian philosopher, Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906). Already as a secondary school student at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, Ziegler was introduced to the doctrines of Hartmann by the philosopher Arthur Drews (1865-1935), and in 1910 he wrote a work on his philosophy entitled Das Weltbild Hartmanns: Eine Beurteilung. He obtained his doctorate in 1905 from the University of Jena, but was unable to take up an academic career on account of his poor health.

Ziegler contributed to the Neoconservative movement of the Weimar Republic through his two works entitled Das heilige Reich der Deutschen (1925) and Der europäische Geist (1929). He was also a friend of the influential Neoconservative thinker Edgar Julius Jung (1894-1934)[1] as well as of Franz von Papen (1879-1969), who served as Chancellor of Germany in 1932 and Vice-Chancellor, under Hitler, from 1933 to 1934. Ziegler’s other works on political philosophy include Volk, Staat und Persönlichkeit (1917) and Von Platons Staatheit zum christlichen Staat (1948), while his interest in religious philosophy is evidenced in works such as Gestaltwandel der Götter (1920), Überlieferung (1936), and Menschwerdung (1944).

However, it is his very first publication from 1902 that presents one of the most perceptive theories of the metaphysics of tragedy. Inspired by the philosophical systems of Schopenhauer and Hartmann and the tragic operas of Richard Wagner, Ziegler’s Metaphysics of Tragedy not only fathoms the ultimate metaphysical basis of tragedy but also reveals the true nature of a tragic hero and a spiritual genius.

The tragic guilt

Ziegler begins by distinguishing ancient tragedy from modern in that the former is based on Fate, while the latter is on Character. Fate is what Schelling, in his Philosophie der Kunst, had called Necessity, which must be overcome by the Freedom of the tragic subject:

That an innocent person becomes guilty through an act of Fate is, as I said, in itself the highest misfortune imaginable. But that this guiltless guilty person voluntarily accepts punishment is the sublime in tragedy; hereby Freedom reveals its highest identity with Necessity.[2]

Ziegler deepens this Schellingian understanding of the identification of Freedom with Necessity by revealing how the tragic hero’s guilt is due to the immanence of Fate in the tragic human microcosm. The guilt of the tragic hero is indeed not a moral guilt — dependent on choice — but a tragic guilt, which is inevitable. This guilt is produced entirely by the intensity of the will of the tragic subject, a quality that distinguishes him from other normal human beings. Thus the saying that “character is destiny” is pre-eminently true of the tragic hero.

As an example of tragic guilt that is not moral guilt, Ziegler points to the case of Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin. It is Elsa’s intense devotion to Lohengrin that makes her infringe the command placed on her by the latter not to attempt to discover his identity. Similarly, the loving kindness of King Lear or the childish trust of Othello become, in their exaggerated development, the causes of tragic downfalls. Tragic heroes or heroines share this intensity of the will with great religious figures such as Luther, Giordano Bruno, and Savonarola. In all these cases, it is the overextended will that is responsible for the disharmony of a tragic life since such a will conflicts with the directions of other wills.

The tragic death

The voluntary choices made by the tragic hero mark him as a “guilty” person, whether he be morally guilty or not, and must be punished by his death. Not all deaths are tragic, however, but only that of a tragic hero, since it is connected logically with the conflict that arises out of his “guilt”:

If life represents itself to us as a sum of conflicts of the will which signify as such the conditio sine qua non of tragedy, now death must be causally and logically connected with the conflict if it should rise to tragedy.

And again:

But if the relation between the subjectively tragic will and the objectively intervening omnipotence is a completely alogical one — if, in other words, there exists no relation between the two facts — one can no longer speak of a tragic death.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s From Plato to Postmodernism here

A tragic death too must, strictly speaking, occur at the moment of the climax of the tragedy when the recognition of the tragic hero’s conflict is complete. However, most tragedies follow natural life, where life is often prolonged after the climactic moment, and this Naturalistic tendency in tragic composition leads to a delayed catastrophe. Yet, every stage in a tragic hero’s career is marked by the logicality of an unconscious immanent fate that can be resolved only through the final negation of the will itself.

The tragic man is, in his identification of his individual will with the universal, much like the genius[3]

because both eo ipso necessarily obey objective goals, indeed can do nothing but satisfy supraindividual goals. Whereas Providence leaves the moral man a small latitude within which he may move freely, this possibility is taken away from the tragic man as well as from the genius. The life of both is a strict obedience with regard to the immanent law that realizes its goals through their individual actions and deeds.

The essence of tragedy, according to Ziegler, consists in the realization of the will as an idea that negates the will. Ziegler thus follows Eduard von Hartmann’s doctrine of the intimate connection between Will and Idea in the Unconscious.[4] The final negation of the will occurs because the guilt of the tragic hero contains an unconscious impulse towards its atonement that results in the negation of his phenomenal life:

That the tragic man had to have a guilt is beyond the intellectual capacity of the man, who stands here perplexed at the borders of the thinkable, the logical — but that this guilt conceals ideally the possibility, even the logical necessity, of its overcoming is the service of the unconscious idea of the tragic will. One and the same act of the will of the tragic man entangles him in the tragic necessity of the conflict and prepares the atonement and resolution of the same. The moment when man loses his freedom phenomenally decides the entire further course of his life, which is dedicated to the reacquisition of freedom through the removal of phenomenality. All that happens through the unconscious idea of the final goal.

A perfect tragedy also cannot depend on external causes for the death of the hero, as in the case of Hamlet’s death through a poisoned rapier when his tragic dilemma is his inability to find a solution to the wickedness of his family and, by extension, of men in general. As Ziegler declares:

I think that tragedy will always be purest where it abandons every external intervention and represents the destruction as a logical overcoming of the will by itself.

The tragedy of the macrocosmic Will

The inextricable relation of Will to Idea in Hartmann’s and Ziegler’s philosophy implies that tragic guilt is present not only in individual wills but in the universal Will itself and in its natural evolution. The tragic will’s assertion of itself entails the destruction of itself, but this is part of the plan of the divine law that pervades the entire universe at every stage of the Will’s operation. As Ziegler points out:

It is a tragic victory when a life-form, whether it be as an individual or as a species, has accomplished its allotted work by asserting its relative right within the total sum of other individuals and other species through the sacrifice of its existence. Tragic for the reason that the high point of the achieved maturity coincides with the limits of logicality and justification of life — for this moment is the beginning of the dissolution and overcoming. And tragic also because the actual will itself knows about the overstepped limit because its force, once unchained, acts continuously with blind necessity — to the end. The revolution and overextension are a means for the world-spirit to implement the intended raising of consciousness — and to this extent one can say that the laws of evolution are of a tragic nature.

The universal tragic Will is in fact forced to realize itself as an Idea that is forced to negate the Will itself: “the will, which indeed can do nothing but realize the principle that negates it, that is, negate itself.” If there is a universal will that does not wish its negation, it can only be attributed to an alogical will, or a will that is “without imagination, ideas, reason, a blind, dumb, absolutely undetermined, absolutely empty, will.” Ziegler calls this original Will God, though it would be better to have called it Nature.

Ziegler does not have the conception of the Absolute Self that Karl August von Eschenmayer, for example,[5] had maintained in his system by distinguishing the World-Soul (which is the same as Schopenhauer’s Will or the driving force that moves between spirit and matter as Reason and Nature) from the transcendent Spirit (or the noumenal Self that constitutes the essence of Schopenhauer’s Will as “thing-in-itself”).[6] By identifying the Will in Nature with God, Ziegler is forced to consider the deity guilty of the natural vicissitudes of this Will:

This random original will is the tragic guilt of God divested of all accidents and particularities insofar as it is macrocosmic. All possible interpretations of tragic guilt in tragedy are traced back to it. In every tragic event it emerges anew in its randomness, every tragic guilt of a man is the repetition of that first guilt of God.

However, even if Ziegler does not distinguish between the God and Nature sufficiently, he does distinguish between the self as the subject of consciousness and the soul. The subject of tragic action, he points out, is not the conscious self:

In the self there is no fate to be encountered, the self cannot realize anything, the self can never conflict with objective directions of the will, the self is not the producer of tragedy; all functions fall beyond our self, beyond our consciousness. If there should be a tragedy there must also be an immanent fate, then we must postulate a creative and active principle that nourishes our consciousness, for in the self we encounter nothing but passive ideas: The world is my idea.

The incomparable excellence of tragedy as an art-form is that it forces us to recognize that the basis of tragedy is indeed not the self, or ego — which has to be negated — but the soul that surpasses it (because it is indeed part of the World-Soul of Eschenmayer and the Will of Schopenhauer):

The fact of tragedy forces us to postulate a real bearer of our consciousness that is not identical with it; it forces us to go beyond the world of mere consciousness and to deny our self in favor of the immanent reality of the tragic will. We are never this will but we are indeed a product of its functions; it is nothing but the metaphysical substratum that lies at the basis of our passive thought; it is the capacity of our spontaneity, of our world of thoughts, always abstracted as its real prius and yet the principle of our life and our action; the immanent fate is therefore nothing but our soul. It is the immanent unity of active will and the idea of the tragic final goal.

The tragic action is not a passive one since it entails the deliberate destruction of the self by the tragic hero now impelled by a consciousness higher than his own intellectual one:

But even now, when the self has atoned for its responsibility, the objection cannot be raised that it watches the actions and deeds of fate like a passive marionette, for the will of fate is always the will of the tragic man; it is also, as unconscious will, the realization of his self. It is nothing less than an alien being that has taken possession of him; it is the real correlative of the self itself that the latter cannot escape and whose constitution it atones for through the extinction of its selfness.

Ziegler gives the examples of Wagner’s tragic characters — Tannhäuser, Elsa, Isolde, Tristan, and even Wotan — who all go to their end conscious of having fulfilled their destiny. The fulfilment of the Destiny of a tragic hero is the fulfilment of the immanent Fate within the tragic subject as part of a purposeful Providence, for “the administration of a purposeful Providence [is] recognized in the tragically unconscious soul just as in the decisions of the moral consciousness.”

The impossibility of tragedy in Nature

However, even though the tragic will is ultimately a universal one, not all of the universal phenomena are tragic. We may remember that Schopenhauer had presented the sublime in Nature as having an effect similar to the tragic in human lives:

Our pleasure in the tragedy belongs not to the feeling of the beautiful, but to that of the sublime; it is, in fact, the highest degree of this feeling. For, just as at the sight of the sublime in nature we turn away from the interest of the will in order to behave in a purely perceptive way, so in the catastrophe we turn away from the will-to-live itself.[7]

However, Ziegler takes care to emphasize that only men can be tragic, because only they have distinct personalities:

the tragic will postulates human personality. Only here, in the heightened and comprehensive activity of human consciousness, do the unconscious individual functions of the Absolute undergo that individual differentiation that stamps every human personality as something completely incomparable. Of course, even here as everywhere, the immanent producer is unconscious, but its productions are regulated, changed, or suppressed according to the stipulations of consciousness. And even when man has once again lost this capacity for the modification of his unconscious decisions, as this is the case precisely with the tragic man, it is still his nature, his fate, his soul that acts and not the instinct of his species.

Nature below the level of human consciousness of the self lacks personality and, consequently, the ability to be tragic:

All stages of objectification below man lack the characteristic of personality. The instinct that alone rules here is, as E. von Hartmann says, characterized by the fact that it “acts purposefully without consciousness of the purpose.” But therewith is drawn the borderline between animal individuality and human personality. Personality distinguishes itself from the lower objectifications by the ability to act purposefully in a conscious way; indeed, this ability is therefore rightly human “freedom.” Through the ability to weigh motives and counter-motives according to their logicality and purposefulness, man has achieved the possibility of escaping from the compulsion of his species, from the necessary decisions of his racial instinct and of substituting in their place the individual goals of his individual consciousness.

Both animals and tragic men act outside the moral sphere, but the animal is sub-moral, whereas the tragic man is supramoral:

The tragedy of the animal instinct is always in a certain sense sub-tragic because the animal has never possessed the capacity of conscious determination; man indeed becomes tragic through the fact that he has lost it again.

The consequence of this abandonment of human morality is the acquisition of tragic guilt on the part of the tragic hero:

Therefore the animal is, in the highest sense of the word, innocent — the tragic man, in spite of his lack of freedom, is guilty insofar as his uncommonly heightened intensity of will necessarily signifies an abandonment of the human moral sphere.

In other words:

the actual field of the tragic remains limited to the type of the tragic man because only here the overextension of the will considered as a loss of human freedom appears as guilt, whereas in all other stages of objectification one can indeed speak of overextension of the will but never in this synthetic sense as individual guilt.

However, the tragic hero does not always become aware of the guilt of his deliberate actions, believing as he does that he is in fact ever moving towards a positive, higher goal. He is not fully aware that his subjective will has now turned against the objective harmony of the phenomenal world.

Tragedy as Redemption

You can buy Greg Johnson’s Graduate School with Heidegger here

We have seen that the eminence of the tragic hero as well as of great spiritual men is due to the intensity of their will that forces them to realize the aims of the Will of the universe immanent in them. These aims are not, as Carlyle had maintained in his doctrine of hero-worship,[8] merely the several ideals that propel the various historic periods forwards, but rather the secret aim of the cosmos itself to return to God.

Since all tragic events are discerned as being part of a purposeful Providence, it is clear that the tragedy of the entire universe moves inexorably towards its own redemption. Redemption itself can be understood only as a longing for a return to the state prior to all individuation, and prior to all manifestation, a return to the supreme unity of the One. The secret motivation of this longing is the essence of Love itself:

And still more do all barriers fall away when we trace back the actual streaming of the will of the entire universe to its simplest denomination — as the love of the individual being split from the One, the Absolute, to be united once again with it and in this way to atone for the tragic guilt of essential alienation — through Love.

 Ziegler pauses to examine the curious mixture of pain and pleasure in the spectators’ enjoyment of a tragedy. Indeed, this mixture was at the base of the Eleusinian mysteries that gave rise to the tragic drama. The pain arises from the necessity of the tragic hero’s having to abandon phenomenal life as we know it. The pleasure felt on observing a tragedy arises from the fact that our intuition glimpses beyond the immanent will the transcendent being. There is in us a voice that understands this as logical, because we are

organized in such a way that we could free ourselves, in spite of our will to life, from ourselves and understand tragic death as the symbol of the victory of the logical over the alogical.

This pleasure therefore arises from the teleological significance of death

because it was completely an immanently logical necessity, and it is this logicality that elevates us, and for whose sake tragedy leaves far, far behind all sadness, all oppressive fatalism and gloom.

The metaphysical pessimism exhibited by all tragedy is thus compensated by the positive nature of the demand for the world’s redemption, for a recognition of the world’s moral meaning. Indeed, the need to abjure the world is evident also in Brāhmanism and Buddhism, just as it is in German idealistic philosophy:

Everywhere the knowledge that breaks through of the guilty divine “base” is the introduction to individual rebirth through which man acknowledges the ideally perfected redemption and reunification with God; everywhere the goal of the world reaches its peak in the advancing power of redemption.

The guilt that is to be redeemed is, of course, not a moral or a personal one since it is a part of the guilt of the entire universal creation:

This primeval and inherited guilt, however, is nothing but the natural desire of the will immanent in us to overstep its limits at the cost of other objectifications of the will. In ethical terms: the inherited religious guilt is egoism. But this guilt is inextricably interwoven with our life; we can never flee from it, for the will is indeed the real base of our existence. The Pauline words are eminently true for the will: “for we live and move and have our being in him.”[9] Now, the moment that really illuminates the essential guilt of our existence can be called rebirth. On it is the possibility of a redemption dependent, with it is this possibility given.

This redemption is at the same time a redemption of God himself:[10]

Insofar as the basis of human guilt is therefore nothing but the change of condition in God, the former is to be called a divine dichotomy, as a dichotomy between his being and his manifestation, which should-not-be. To this extent therefore the redemption of man from his guilt is the redemption of God from his dichotomous state. Man’s mission is therefore finally the redemption of God; by denying his will he abjures the realization of the divine will, by freeing himself from the oppressive curse to be a being at the cost of the divine Being, he frees even God from the same for having abandoned this being enclosed-in-itself. The essence of the God-man and of religion is therefore mysticism, that is, belief in the reunification with the divine being.

However, in religion, the result of such a redemption is the blessed transformation of man, whereas in a tragedy it is his necessary death. Also, the religious man works throughout his life for a conscious negation of his self, whereas the tragic man is unaware of the working of immanent fate in his will and resembles the religious man only in his resolution to choose death rather than life in the resolution of his tragic conflict. But the tragic death is always an integral part of the universal redemption that is the goal of the universal Will:

Insofar as the immanent fate expiated by the tragic death is only a functional splinter of the unconscious fate of the cosmos, that is, identical to the metaphysical real base of all individuals, one can also say that the immanent fate plays an analogous role in tragedy to God in religion. Thus here, too, in tragedy one can justifiably speak of a redemption of the world-spirit, at least of that part of it that had become immanent in the tragic man.

Ziegler pauses to examine the conduct of the Dionysiac mysteries that Nietzsche too had focused on in his Geburt der Tragödie. He agrees that the Bacchantes were rather like Indian yogis who immersed themselves in divine ecstasy to seek union with God. However, he points out Nietzsche’s error in believing that these ecstatic performances were intended for the achievement of personal immortality or for a participation in the eternal pleasure in Becoming of the creative God. Ziegler refutes this false philosophy of tragedy:

We, who do not believe that the justification of life is its eternity, who are convinced that the pleasure of no creature balances the displeasure of all others, and who do not believe in any metaphysical pleasure but indeed in a divine suffering, will also not share Nietzsche’s opinion that the nature of mysticism and tragedy is the consolation of indestructibility. That the mystic thinks that God is holy is indeed incidental; the principal thing is that he is convinced of his empirical unholiness. What is to be observed in Greek mysticism and in tragedy is not the belief in the transcendental holiness of God but the deep longing to seek to forget the earthly unholiness in the unio mystica on the one hand and, on the other, the immersion into the tragic symbol of the suffering of the world through whose voluntary assumption of this suffering the original redemption from it is prepared (Prometheus).

The Christian belief in the immortality of the soul too renders tragedy impossible, since death is thereby robbed of its painful tragic effect.[11] Strangely, Ziegler thinks that Protestantism permitted the flourishing of tragedy, such as Shakespeare’s after the Catholic Middle Ages, since it focused once again on the reality and joy of life. But this is to ignore the fact that Shakespeare himself may have been a Catholic, and his major tragedies are also not set in Protestant times. Besides, the Puritans, the radical Protestant sect, were even opposed to theatrical productions, which they banned in 1642 after the first English Civil War.

Further, Ziegler suggests that the personal conception of the deity in Christianity (which derives from the Judaic) makes it impossible that a perfectly good God would stand in need of a redemption. Thus, a worldview that “seeks to do justice to the nature of tragedy must necessarily be Pantheistic, that is, the belief in an unconsciously immanent absolute principle that can become tragic fate.” However, he seems to recognize that there is indeed a basis for a Christian tragic worldview in the story of the Fall of Man:

But if Christianity wanted a tragedy it would have to transfer it to a time before birth (which is suggested also in the Fall of Man), since the transition from pre-existence to existence plays the role of a catastrophe; the consequence of tragic guilt would then be not death but life.

As evidence of the passion of the originally guilty universal Will, Ziegler erroneously gives the example of Christ’s crucifixion:

This unfortunate dissatisfaction is the Christ who is crucified in every man, who is overcome in a twofold manner: ideally, every day and hour in the constant, bitter battle against motivation,[12] in real life through death.

Ziegler forgets that Christ’s death on the cross is that of the “second Adam,” who expiates the Fall of the first. This is the significance of Paul’s words, in 1 Corinthians 15:22, that “as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” The first Adam corresponds, indeed, to the manifest Brahman, called Purusha (the first cosmic manifestation of the divine Soul, Ātman as a macroanthropos)[13] in Brāhmanism, whereas the unmanifest Brahman is the ineffable transcendent Self, or God.

Another prohibition of the metaphysics of tragedy is the use of a wise man as a tragic hero since he, as a moral man, will naturally avoid all conflicts productive of tragedy. As Ziegler elaborates:

The moral man recognizes it as his eminent duty to conserve his life so long as this is necessary for the realization of objective goals; the moral consciousness demands the maintenance of life unperturbed even if the measure of personal suffering has apparently gone beyond those limits where man may continue to live. The wise man recognizes the value of life merely in its indirectness; in itself worthless and without a goal, it is necessary for the execution of the work that is being performed.

But tragic death must necessarily be an unfree effect of the immanent fate in the individual will. Here, the evolution of human consciousness itself independently of the Unconscious steadily works against the development of the tragic sense:

But Nature has endowed the majority of men in such a way that they do not listen clearly to the voices of the unconscious. Nature directs itself in its entire evolutionary process to breaking the absolute power of the unconscious will and placing the conscious decision of man in the place of the decision of Fate — Nature therefore clearly works in a quite definite way against the extension and generalization of tragedy just as it makes the birth of genius through the heightening of consciousness difficult. The entire evolution curbs the field of tragedy more and more . . .

However, the revival of tragedy cannot occur through a return to instinctual life that reverses all the slow accomplishments of evolution. Thus, Nietzsche was certainly wrong in stressing the instinctual life as a superhuman goal. Rather, the tragic process can henceforth only be realized in the macrocosm itself:

Indeed, the progressing evolution signifies an increasing reduction of all individual tragedy, as we have seen, in that it increasingly curbs and restricts the conditio sine qua non, the absolute rule of the immanent fate, but even thereby it reshapes the entire course of the natural and spiritual evolution so much more strikingly into a cosmic tragedy.

You can buy Collin Cleary’sWhat is a Rune? here

Ziegler’s negation of the universal will is reminiscent of that of Eduard von Hartmann, who, unlike Schopenhauer, did not consider individual renunciation sufficient to put an end to the problem of the world, for this, according to Hartmann, cannot hinder the universal Will from continuing to perpetuate itself through pain in the various manifestations of Nature. Rather, the ultimate hope consists in what he calls an eventual “cosmic-universal negation of will.”[14] This grandiose ethical aim of Hartmann’s metaphysics appears less extravagant in Ziegler’s metaphysics, which focuses on the “redemptive” import of the negation of the cosmic will as well as of that of the tragic hero:

This act of world redemption may be called the tragedy par excellence, as the essence of tragedy, for here the tragic hero is the cosmos in its totality of the directions of the will conflicting with one another; the immanent fate is the entire fullness of the will immanent in the world; and the overcoming teleology is the totality of all logical relations in its discharge into the finality of the absolute goal of the world that encompasses all of them: the destruction of the tragic guilt of the metaphysical will. The tragic subject which, during the world process, suffered in and was released from countless individual existences frees itself now from the necessity of individualization and raises the small individual tragedies into a single tragedy of the universe.

Indeed, every heroic death is an anticipation of the macrocosmic tragedy. The latter, however, can be appreciated only through an intensification of the religious mentality:

The increasing process of becoming conscious of this cosmotragic process will go hand-in-hand with the increase of religious consciousness that is announced in an ever more intensive conception of the problem of redemption. Only the increasing understanding of this paves the way for the knowledge that tragedy, too, is nothing but one of those dark paths to redemption that our fate — God — asked us to take.

Moreover, since the negation of the will to individuation in the cosmic process is nothing but a longing to return to the One, tragedy itself is essentially nothing but the Love that impels man and the world back to God:

Tragedy, then, is that which in the final analysis impels all the activities of the world — Love and its will, which is the same everywhere — to find in God the peace of the world that has been overcome.

Tragedy and worldview

One interesting aspect of Ziegler’s metaphysical study is its association of tragedy with worldview in general, for

the sole and exclusive possibility of observing the objective play of endlessly complicated world processes and to produce it from itself in simplified lines is possessed by drama and, most eminently, tragedy. In it, therefore, the relations to the worldview will be more striking and clearer than in the plastic or lyrical arts.

Tragedy reflects the current worldview of the people producing it:

the unconsciously implicit laws of tragedy are themselves a worldview; they are in no way formal rules, but the reverse: The form of tragedy is such a one that has been crystallized gradually out of the residue of quite definite thought connections. Every great deviation, every new synthesis in human worldview, has at first had a reaction quite unconsciously on the formation of tragedy.

The tragic worldview, as well as the tragic art, is best represented in the modern world by the Germans:

It is obviously based in our nature that we have felt, above all things, the tragedy of life. Not without reason could we be called the purely tragic people, for the sense of the inviolable law of the evil of existence is quite differently developed in our worldview than among the Greeks. The deep melancholy of tragedy is extended to the finest ramifications of our intellectual life and does not easily allow a work of our genius arise that is not affected by this gloomy seriousness. Of all human types, the German has conceived himself as the tragic, for a consuming fire of self-destruction burns in all his ideas and works. The old significance of our mythology according to which the earthly heroes recognize their calling to go down along with their guilty gods is revived in each of our great men. The German has always recognized his idea and his mission as destiny and fate. Loyalty, which Houston Stewart Chamberlain so finely celebrates as a fundamental feature of our character, is a tragic one, for it is the voluntary-necessary devotion till destruction. This devotion is necessary because it is nothing but an affirmation of our character, and voluntary because it recognizes in this the natural law to obey which is elevated to a duty.

It was the Germanic peoples who, in Shakespeare, established the modern tragedy of character as opposed to the Greek tragedies of Fate. But it was the philosophy of Schopenhauer that inspired the lofty tragedy of Richard Wagner, focused on the need for redemption:

the tragedy of R. Wagner differentiates itself specifically from antique and Shakespearean tragedy through the conception of tragic death as redemption. Is it now a coincidence that this idea of redemption is not only the punctum saliens of the entire Schopenhauerian metaphysics, but has today once again found in the philosophy of E. von Hartmann perhaps its most energetic and greatest expression?

It is true that the modern age of Darwinistic science and Marxist politics denies the metaphysical pessimism that is associated with the religious sensibility:

By denying metaphysical pessimism and the belief in teleology, in the same way one has buried the spring itself that drives all the gears: religion.

And so the revival of the tragic sense can only occur with the renewal of religion, as Wagner insisted:

The theoretical impossibility of our age to raise itself up to an understanding of tragedy, which is constantly confused with pathos, and its practical inability to create a tragedy are therefore only the purely logical consequences of its religious indifference. The solution of the problem of tragedy is linked to the solution of the religious, and R. Wagner is fully right when he hopes for a regenerative new creation of tragedy only from a renewal and reformation of religious conditions.

The hope of such a regeneration of religion lies, therefore, in a consolidation of the Schopenhauerian worldview:

One will perhaps later date from the emergence of Schopenhauer the blooming of a new, purely Aryan religion of redemption and celebrate his genius as the reawakened spirit of our Germanic religious metaphysics, and one will then have to consider that at the same moment a new tragedy arose that represents as high a developmental phase of tragedy as the Schopenhauerian metaphysics does that of religious consciousness. And again, it is not a coincidence that there arose only among us Germans the beginning of a new tragedy, the only people in the world that, in the midst of an unexampled coarsening and degeneration of all thought, still possesses enough power of metaphysical formation to perfect, in Eduard von Hartmann, the synthesis of all mythical and metaphysical ideas from the Upanishads and Plotinus to Schelling and Schopenhauer.

*  *  *

Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.

  • First, donor comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
  • Second, donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Non-donors will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days.

To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:

Paywall Gift Subscriptions

If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:

  • your payment
  • the recipient’s name
  • the recipient’s email address
  • your name
  • your email address

To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.

Notes

[1] Ziegler wrote a monograph on Jung called Edgar Julius Jung: Denkmal und Vermächtnis (1955).

[2] Schelling, “Von der Tragödie,” in Philosophie der Kunst.

[3] From the examples that Ziegler gives of geniuses (see above), it may be taken for granted that he means primarily spiritual geniuses.

[4] For a more detailed study of the philosophy of Hartmann, see, for instance, Alexander Jacob, De Naturae Natura: A Study of Idealistic Conceptions of Nature and the Unconscious (London: Arktos, 2011), Ch. IX.

[5] See Alexander Jacob, op. cit., Ch. VI.

[6] For Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, see Alexander Jacob, op. cit., Ch. IX.

[7] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, Ch. 37 (tr. E. F. J. Payne).

[8] See Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841).

[9] Acts 17:28.

[10] We are reminded of the final scene of Wagner’s Parsifal with its moving affirmations of “Erlösung dem Erlöser (Redemption to the Redeemer).”

[11] Cf., in this context, Miguel de Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (The Tragic Sense of Life), (1912): “And here, facing this supreme religious sacrifice, we reach the summit of the tragedy, the very heart of it — the sacrifice of our own individual consciousness upon the altar of the perfected Human Consciousness, of the Divine Consciousness. But is there really a tragedy? . . . if we could succeed in understanding and feeling that we were going to enrich Christ, should we hesitate for a moment in surrendering ourselves utterly to Him?” (Ch. X)

[12] The word Ziegler uses is Bereitschaft, which seems to refer to the Bereitschaftspotential (readiness potential), or readiness for movement that precedes voluntary movement in the body.

[13] For a detailed study of the ancient Indo-Europeans’ cosmogony, see Alexander Jacob, Ātman: A Reconstruction of the Solar Cosmology of the Indo-Europeans (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2005). The “Fall” of this First Man is what leads to the passion of Osiris/Dionysus/Christ in the “underworld” and the consequent rise of the Sun into our universe.

[14] E. von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewussten, Sec. C, Ch. 14.

Related

  • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 448
    The Writers’ Bloc with Karl Thorburn on Mutually Assured Destruction

  • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 447
    New Ask Me Anything with Greg Johnson

  • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 446
    James J. O’Meara on Hunter S. Thompson

  • The Copypasta Apocalypse
    From Jesus to Gendron, via Brother Stair

  • The Life & Death of a Patriot:
    Personal Reflections on the Great Replacement

  • Remembering Richard Wagner
    (May 22, 1813–February 13, 1883)

  • “Should War Be Criminalized?”

  • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 445
    The Writers’ Bloc with Kathryn S. on Mircea Eliade

Tags

Alexander JacobArthur DrewsArthur SchopenhauerBrahmanismChristianityEduard von HartmannF. W. J. SchellingfateFriedrich NietzscheGermansJudaismLeopold Zieglermetaphysics of tragedynaturepaywallProtestantismRichard Wagnerthe Conservative Revolutionthe fall of Manthe unconsciousthe willtragedytragic hero

Previous

« The Coming Convergence of “Race Realism” & Precision Medicine:
Opportunities & Challenges for White Advocates

  • Recent posts

    • White Americans’ Racial Consciousness is No Longer an Unknown Quantity

      Beau Albrecht

      10

    • The Tex-Mex Misfit Massacre

      Jim Goad

      14

    • White Identity Nationalism, Part 2

      Neil Kumar

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 448
      The Writers’ Bloc with Karl Thorburn on Mutually Assured Destruction

      Counter-Currents Radio

    • The US Spring Primaries are a Sign that White Identity Politics is Here to Stay

      Cyan Quinn

      6

    • The Union Jackal, May 2022

      Mark Gullick

      3

    • White Identity Nationalism, Part 1

      Neil Kumar

      3

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 447
      New Ask Me Anything with Greg Johnson

      Counter-Currents Radio

      3

    • On Racial Humor

      Spencer J. Quinn

      25

    • Facts on the Ground

      Hamilton T. Burger

      4

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 446
      James J. O’Meara on Hunter S. Thompson

      Counter-Currents Radio

      2

    • O Manifesto Nacionalista Branco:
      Parte 3, Genocídio Branco

      Greg Johnson

    • The Worst Week Yet:
      May 15-21, 2022

      Jim Goad

      24

    • Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts

      Anthony Bavaria

      6

    • The Copypasta Apocalypse
      From Jesus to Gendron, via Brother Stair

      James J. O'Meara

    • The Life & Death of a Patriot:
      Personal Reflections on the Great Replacement

      Veiko Hessler

      2

    • Remembering Richard Wagner
      (May 22, 1813–February 13, 1883)

      Greg Johnson

    • This Weekend’s Livestreams
      James O’Meara on Counter-Currents Radio & Karl Thorburn on The Writers’ Bloc

      Greg Johnson

      4

    • The Counter-Currents 2022 Fundraiser
      Every Man an Editor

      Greg Johnson

      7

    • Against the Negative Approach in Politics

      Nicholas R. Jeelvy

      6

    • What Christian Nationalism Looks Like in Current-Year America

      Robert Hampton

      25

    • “Should War Be Criminalized?”

      Greg Johnson

      5

    • O Manifesto Nacionalista Branco:
      Parte 2, Extinção Branca

      Greg Johnson

    • Morálka lidské mysli Jonathana Haidta, část druhá

      Collin Cleary

    • Animals & Children First

      Jim Goad

      41

    • The Great Replacement Prize

      Greg Johnson

    • Remembering Julius Evola
      (May 19, 1898–June 11, 1974)

      Greg Johnson

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 445
      The Writers’ Bloc with Kathryn S. on Mircea Eliade

      Counter-Currents Radio

      2

    • O Manifesto Nacionalista Branco:
      Parte 1, Introdução

      Greg Johnson

    • Extremities:
      A Film from Long Ago that Anticipated Today’s Woke Hollywood

      Stephen Paul Foster

      10

    • The National Health Service:
      My Part in Its Downfall

      Mark Gullick

      10

    • Male Supremacism in the United States?

      Margot Metroland

      2

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 444
      Ask Me Anything with Greg Johnson

      Counter-Currents Radio

      1

    • Fallen Castes

      Thomas Steuben

      18

    • Work to Be Such a Man

      Morris van de Camp

      6

    • Be a Medici:
      New Patrons for a New Renaissance

      Robert Wallace

      21

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 443
      Interview with Jim Goad

      Counter-Currents Radio

    • Das Manifest des weißen Nationalismus:
      Teil 5, Die Wiederherstellung Unserer Weissen Heimatländer

      Greg Johnson

    • Where Do We Go from Buffalo?

      Jim Goad

      42

    • Rammstein’s Deutschland

      Ondrej Mann

      8

    • If I Lost Hope

      Greg Johnson

      5

    • Das Manifest des weißen Nationalismus:
      Teil 4, Wie Können Wir den Weissen Genozid Beenden?

      Greg Johnson

    • Payton Gendron & the Buffalo Massacre

      Greg Johnson

      66

    • The Counter-Currents 2022 Fundraiser
      Between Now and May 20th, Give a New Monthly Gift and Receive a New Book!

      Cyan Quinn

    • This Weekend’s Livestreams
      Jim Goad on Counter-Currents Radio & Kathryn S. on The Writers’ Bloc

      Greg Johnson

    • Remembering Hinton Rowan Helper

      Spencer J. Quinn

      11

    • Make Art Great Again:
      The Good Optics of Salvador Dalí, Part 3

      James J. O'Meara

    • Babette’s Feast

      Nicholas R. Jeelvy

      2

    • Das Manifest des weißen Nationalismus:
      Teil 3, Weisser Völkermord

      Greg Johnson

    • Hey, Portland Synagogue Vandal — Whatcha Doin’?

      Jim Goad

      26

  • Recent comments

    • Shift The Tex-Mex Misfit Massacre Obama probably twatted that tweet about "For crying out loud, people, let's not forget career...
    • Shift The Tex-Mex Misfit Massacre This one's dead, Beau.
    • Beau Albrecht The Tex-Mex Misfit Massacre I figure it probably was a copycat crime, following all the other stuff that's been happening.  He...
    • Jud Jackson White Americans’ Racial Consciousness is No Longer an Unknown Quantity Excellent article.  One small objection.  You write "... keep in mind that only about a third of...
    • Jeffrey A Freeman White Americans’ Racial Consciousness is No Longer an Unknown Quantity When I was deep in my fallen state and hated the truth with a reactive passion, blessed was anyone...
    • Beau Albrecht White Americans’ Racial Consciousness is No Longer an Unknown Quantity I remember when comment sections used to be common for MSM and other leftist sites.  Most of them...
    • Beau Albrecht White Americans’ Racial Consciousness is No Longer an Unknown Quantity I've had some fairly similar experiences.  I say something contrary to The Narrative, and from the...
    • Philip White Americans’ Racial Consciousness is No Longer an Unknown Quantity More good news for white people. All races besides had fewer births year-over-year in 2021 vs...
    • speedoSanta The US Spring Primaries are a Sign that White Identity Politics is Here to Stay How disappointing.  I can’t imagine a candidate arguing more honestly, reasonably, patriotically, or...
    • The Alienation Constant The Tex-Mex Misfit Massacre I think that all societies — even self-contained, racially and linguistically homogeneous societies...
    • Shift The Tex-Mex Misfit Massacre It's a quandary:  How to pin this one on racist global warming?
    • Shift The Tex-Mex Misfit Massacre It's the entertainers who tend to give us: "I care so much more about murdered children than...
    • Romulus The Tex-Mex Misfit Massacre Ramos ended up killing two little white girls, so he can go to hell. Otherwise, this is not the...
    • James Kirkpatrick The US Spring Primaries are a Sign that White Identity Politics is Here to Stay Well put, Cyan!  This is very edifying. 16,400 people.  I don't care what percentage that is of...
    • Jeffrey A Freeman The Tex-Mex Misfit Massacre Was Richard Ramirez reincarnated into globohomo?
    • La-Z-Man The Tex-Mex Misfit Massacre The quiet type. I am reminded of a comedian who once said that it's the mosquitoes that don't buzz...
    • Peter Quint The Tex-Mex Misfit Massacre All were gun controls psyops! Biden did the same thing, beginning in Obama's second term. Biden has...
    • Dr ExCathedra Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 447
      New Ask Me Anything with Greg Johnson
      On the necessary link between the Constitution and the people whose culture it expresses: "......
    • Shift The Tex-Mex Misfit Massacre Can't help but notice that, so far, no one has called the killer a brown supremacist. These...
    • La-Z-Man White Americans’ Racial Consciousness is No Longer an Unknown Quantity These are very encouraging numbers. Assuming equal likelihood, 1/5 for each question response being...
  • Books

    • Kerry Bolton
    • Jonathan Bowden
    • Buttercup Dew
    • Collin Cleary
    • Jef Costello
    • F. Roger Devlin
    • Julius Evola
    • Gregory Hood
    • Juleigh Howard-Hobson
    • Greg Johnson
    • Jason Jorjani
    • Ward Kendall
    • Anthony M. Ludovici
    • Trevor Lynch
    • H. L. Mencken
    • J. A. Nicholl
    • Andy Nowicki
    • James J. O'Meara
    • Michael O'Meara
    • Christopher Pankhurst
    • Tito Perdue
    • Michael Polignano
    • Spencer J. Quinn
    • Savitri Devi
    • Fenek Solère
    • Irmin Vinson
    • Leo Yankevich
    • Francis Parker Yockey
  • Webzine Authors

    Contemporary authors

    • Howe Abbott-Hiss
    • Beau Albrecht
    • Aquilonius
    • Anthony Bavaria
    • Michael Bell
    • Alain de Benoist
    • Kerry Bolton
    • Jonathan Bowden
    • Buttercup Dew
    • Collin Cleary
    • Giles Corey
    • Jef Costello
    • Morris V. de Camp
    • F. Roger Devlin
    • Bain Dewitt
    • Jack Donovan
    • Ricardo Duchesne
    • Émile Durand
    • Guillaume Durocher
    • Mark Dyal
    • Guillaume Faye
    • Stephen Paul Foster
    • Fullmoon Ancestry
    • Jim Goad
    • Tom Goodrich
    • Alex Graham
    • Mark Gullick
    • Andrew Hamilton
    • Robert Hampton
    • Huntley Haverstock
    • Derek Hawthorne
    • Gregory Hood
    • Juleigh Howard-Hobson
    • Richard Houck
    • Alexander Jacob
    • Nicholas R. Jeelvy
    • Greg Johnson
    • Ruuben Kaalep
    • Tobias Langdon
    • Julian Langness
    • Travis LeBlanc
    • Patrick Le Brun
    • Trevor Lynch
    • Kevin MacDonald
    • G. A. Malvicini
    • John Michael McCloughlin
    • Margot Metroland
    • Millennial Woes
    • John Morgan
    • James J. O'Meara
    • Michael O'Meara
    • Christopher Pankhurst
    • Michael Polignano
    • J. J. Przybylski
    • Spencer J. Quinn
    • Quintilian
    • Edouard Rix
    • C. B. Robertson
    • C. F. Robinson
    • Hervé Ryssen
    • Kathryn S.
    • Alan Smithee
    • Fenek Solère
    • Ann Sterzinger
    • Thomas Steuben
    • Robert Steuckers
    • Tomislav Sunić
    • Donald Thoresen
    • Marian Van Court
    • Dominique Venner
    • Irmin Vinson
    • Michael Walker
    • Aylmer Wedgwood
    • Scott Weisswald
    • Leo Yankevich

    Classic Authors

    • Maurice Bardèche
    • Julius Evola
    • Ernst Jünger
    • D. H. Lawrence
    • Charles Lindbergh
    • Jack London
    • H. P. Lovecraft
    • Anthony M. Ludovici
    • Sir Oswald Mosley
    • National Vanguard
    • Friedrich Nietzsche
    • Revilo Oliver
    • William Pierce
    • Ezra Pound
    • Saint-Loup
    • Savitri Devi
    • Carl Schmitt
    • Miguel Serrano
    • Oswald Spengler
    • P. R. Stephensen
    • Jean Thiriart
    • John Tyndall
    • Francis Parker Yockey
  • Departments

    • Book Reviews
    • Movie Reviews
    • TV Reviews
    • Music Reviews
    • Art Criticism
    • Graphic Novels & Comics
    • Video Game Reviews
    • Fiction
    • Poems
    • Interviews
    • Videos
    • English Translations
    • Other Languages
      • Arabic
      • Bulgarian
      • Croatian
      • Czech
      • Danish
      • Dutch
      • Estonian
      • Finnish
      • French
      • German
      • Greek
      • Hungarian
      • Italian
      • Lithuanian
      • Norwegian
      • Polish
      • Portuguese
      • Romanian
      • Russian
      • Slovak
      • Spanish
      • Swedish
      • Ukrainian
    • Commemorations
    • Why We Write
  • Archives
  • Top 100 Commenters
Sponsored Links
Alaska Chaga Antelope Hill Publishing Imperium Press American Renaissance A Dissident’s Guide to Blacks and Africa The Patrick Ryan Show Jim Goad The Occidental Observer
Editor-in-Chief
Greg Johnson
Books for sale
  • Trevor Lynch’s Classics of Right-Wing Cinema
  • The Enemy of Europe
  • Imperium
  • Reactionary Modernism
  • Manifesto del Nazionalismo Bianco
  • O Manifesto Nacionalista Branco
  • Vade Mecum
  • Whiteness: The Original Sin
  • Space Vixen Trek Episode 17: Tomorrow the Stars
  • The Year America Died
  • Passing the Buck
  • Mysticism After Modernism
  • Gold in the Furnace
  • Defiance
  • Forever & Ever
  • Wagner’s Ring & the Germanic Tradition
  • Resistance
  • Materials for All Future Historians
  • Love Song of the Australopiths
  • White Identity Politics
  • Here’s the Thing
  • Trevor Lynch: Part Four of the Trilogy
  • Graduate School with Heidegger
  • It’s Okay to Be White
  • The World in Flames
  • The White Nationalist Manifesto
  • From Plato to Postmodernism
  • The Gizmo
  • Return of the Son of Trevor Lynch’s CENSORED Guide to the Movies
  • Toward a New Nationalism
  • The Smut Book
  • The Alternative Right
  • My Nationalist Pony
  • Dark Right: Batman Viewed From the Right
  • The Philatelist
  • Confessions of an Anti-Feminist
  • East and West
  • Though We Be Dead, Yet Our Day Will Come
  • White Like You
  • Numinous Machines
  • Venus and Her Thugs
  • Cynosura
  • North American New Right, vol. 2
  • You Asked For It
  • More Artists of the Right
  • Extremists: Studies in Metapolitics
  • The Homo & the Negro
  • Rising
  • The Importance of James Bond
  • In Defense of Prejudice
  • Confessions of a Reluctant Hater (2nd ed.)
  • The Hypocrisies of Heaven
  • Waking Up from the American Dream
  • Green Nazis in Space!
  • Truth, Justice, and a Nice White Country
  • Heidegger in Chicago
  • The End of an Era
  • Sexual Utopia in Power
  • What is a Rune? & Other Essays
  • Son of Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies
  • The Lightning & the Sun
  • The Eldritch Evola
  • Western Civilization Bites Back
  • New Right vs. Old Right
  • Journey Late at Night: Poems and Translations
  • The Non-Hindu Indians & Indian Unity
  • Baader Meinhof ceramic pistol, Charles Kraaft 2013
  • Pulp Fascism
  • The Lost Philosopher, Second Expanded Edition
  • Trevor Lynch’s A White Nationalist Guide to the Movies
  • And Time Rolls On
  • Artists of the Right
  • North American New Right, Vol. 1
  • Some Thoughts on Hitler
  • Tikkun Olam and Other Poems
  • Summoning the Gods
  • Taking Our Own Side
  • Reuben
  • The Node
  • The New Austerities
  • Morning Crafts
  • The Passing of a Profit & Other Forgotten Stories
  • Rss
  • DLive
  • Telegram
  • Gab
  • Entropy
Copyright © 2022 Counter-Currents Publishing, Ltd.

Paywall Access





Please enter your email address. You will receive mail with link to set new password.

Edit your comment