Zusammenfassung
„Gilt es das Recht — wer will ihn vorladen?“ heißt es in der tragischen Dichtung der Bibel, dem Buch Hiob. Das Zentralthema der griechischen Tragödie ist die Gerechtigkeit, behauptet Sewall.
„Poco reparo tiene lo infalible, y mucho riesgo lo previsto tiene: si ha de ser, la defensa es imposible, que quien la escusa más, más la previene. ! Dura ley! ! fuerte caso! ! horror terrible! quien pensa que huey el riesgo, al riesgo viene; con lo que yo guardaba me he perdido; yo mismo, yo mi patria he destruído.“ (Calderon, La vida es sueo)1 …ά̓γραπτα κἀσϑαλη̄ ϑεω̄ν νόμιμα δύνασϑαι ϑνητòν δνϑ ὄπϑ̓ ν̓περδραμεΐν. ού γάρ τι νυ̃ν γε κάχϑές, άλλ̓ ἀεί ποτέ ζη̄ ταυ̃τα, κοὐδεὶς οΐδεν ἐξ ὁ̓του `φάνη. (Die ungeschriebenen und unwandelbaren Gesetze — nicht von heute noch von gestern, sondern immerdar leben diese, und keiner weiß, woher sie kamen.) (Sophokles, Antigone, vv. 454–457)
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Referenzen
„Unwiderstehlich ist des Schicksals Lenkung,/ Und oft gefahrvoll, sie voraus erfahren./ Nicht schützen kann sich menschliche Beschränkung;/ Denn Schlimmes lockt man durch zu ängstlich Wahren./ Grausam Gebot! Hart Schicksal! Schwere Kränkung!/ Gefahren fliehn, das bringt erst in Gefahren./ Mein Unglück wird, was Schutz mir sollt’ erwerben;/ Ich selbst, ich wirkte meines Reichs Verderben“ (dt. Übersetzung von Gries 1815, zit. nach Szondi 1961/1978, S. 224).
Ich zitiere aus dem Buch von Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens (1941, 1966): „The Dionysiac thiasos was a secret magical society which preserved in modified form the structure and functions of the totemic clan, out of which it had evolved during the later phases of tribal society. It was composed of women led by a male priest. Its principal rite, derived from initiation, contained three elements — an orgiastic exodus into the open country, [pompe], a sacrament in which a victim was torn to pieces and eaten raw [agon], and a triumphant return [komos]. This ritual was projected as a myth of the passion of Dionysus. Since its function was to promote the fertility of the soil, it persisted only among the peasantry, and so at a later stage became closely identified with the popular movement against the landed nobility. In some parts of Greece, owing to changes in the social relations of the sexes, the ritual passed into the control of the men and underwent further modification. It ceased to be secret, and began to disintegrate. The orgiastic procession became a hymn, which was developed most rapidly in the Peloponnese; the sacrament became a passion-play, developed principally in Attica, where the popular movement, after beginning later, progressed further. From the first arose the dithyramb, from the second tragedy. Both were urbanized and consciously directed by the tyrants, the former maturing under the influence of aristocratic lyric“ (S. 183).
„Greek tragedy, by the peculiarity of its form, is committed to a special kind of double vision: the hero’s view of himself and the cho rus’s view of him. The duality belongs to the form and cannot be argued away ... Thus the original form of tragedy — single actor and chorus — established a tension which is of its essence“ (S. 44).
„The idea of a stylistic influence exerted by the heroic dithyramb upon tragedy in Athens during the last qu art er of the six t h cen tu ry and the beginning of the fifth, is worlds removed from the traditional derivation of tragedy from the dithyramb, whether in Peloponnese or Athens. The essential thing about tragedy — its form — could never have been derived from the dithyramb or from any lyric genre. The self-presentation of the hero is a new idea. And the tragic chorus likewise is a new thing. Its function and status, its raison d’être, can only stem from its relation to the hero“ (S. 74).
„The key to the dilemma is that the tragic threnos is a ritual element introduced into a nonritual setting and for a new pu rpose, to bewail a person who is neither a member of the family nor an object of worship but a hero of poetry. The feelings and forms traditionally associated with the cult of one’s own dead are here transferred to a poetic individual, a figure of the imagination with whom one has no direct ties of blood or family“ (S. 75).
„Tragoidos was cut from the same cloth as rhapsoidos, and did not mean either that its bearer sang or that he impersonated a goat. What it did mean is sufficiently clear from the Parian Marble, which tells us that the original prize for which the ‚tragedian‘ competed was a goat. Very likely the name was ironic when it was first bestowed: ,goat-bard‘ might convey the suggestion“ (S. 70).
„The Iliad, with its dual vision of heroism and the tragic limits of heroism, is the root of all tragedy in the western world, and therefore of all tragedy. But it took Thespis’ act of genius to bring the Homeric vision into focus for a new age. The Iliad deals only with the heroes; the common man is present only as backdrop, stage setting, or else as the audience, sitting and listening to a far-off tale of long ago. Tragedy for the first time brought the far-away directly into the present and the great man into direct contact with the little man. It did these two things through the twin devices of the ,actor‘ and the chorus. Through the actor, who was the hero standing before him, and the chorus, which was ‚like himself’, the ordinary Athenian was enabled to feel, to sympathize, with the hero in a new, direct way. Here all Athenians, noble and commoner alike, could meet on common ground, in a common surge of emotional identification with the heroic spirit ... Tragedy represented, in effect, the beginning of a new spiritual unification of Attica ... The burden of the whole was a pathos, the death or suffering of a hero“ (S.76).
„His [Pisistratus’] motive for supporting tragedy must have been at least to some extent pedagogical: he wanted tragedy to stand forth as the educator of his people, as Homer did at the Panathenaea. And perhaps we can conjecture that he had an even more specific idea in mind: tragedy, along with Homer, as an instrument for the rapprochement of the classes, an emotional unification of all Athenians in a common sympathy for fallen greatness“ (S. 77).
„Thus Aeschylus begins to introduce action into tragedy in two senses: the hero’s decisive single act, preceded by agonized hesitation and surrounded by doubts and terrors, and the action as a whole, leading through the decision to the pathos as its climax. And this more complex pattern is further broadened and complicated by the appearance of the connected trilogy, so that the action of each play in turn forms part of a larger ‚whole action“‘ (S. 89).
„He saw the heroic pathos as a thing of gigantic proportions, tremendous weight and depth and spread“ (S. 91).
„Aeschylus ... could understand actions of this compass only as a product of what has been called ‚dual motivation’, that is, human and divine impulsion working together“ (S. 92).
„mental anguish, hesitation between two lines of conduct both of which involve wrong and suffering“ (S. 95).
„Yet the discrepancy remains between the pathos-centered individual play and the redemption-centered whole“ (S.100).
„The earliest form of tragedy, which was not action, but pure passion, used the form of sympatheia, through which the spectators shared the emotions of the chorus, to focus their attention on the doom sent by the gods to produce the tragedy. Without the problem of tyche or moira ... true tragedy would never have developed out of the early dithyramb on a mythical theme“ (Bd. 1, S. 250).
„The tragic vision is in its first phase primal, or primitive, in that it calls up out of the depths the first (and last) of all questions, the question of existence: What does it mean to be? It recalls the original terror, harking back to a world that antedates the conceptions of philosophy, the consolations of the later religions, and whatever constructions the human mind has devised to persuade itself that its universe is secure. It recalls the original un-reason, the terror of the irrational. It sees man as questioner, naked, unaccommodated, alone, facing mysterious, demonic forces in his own nature and outside, and the irreducible facts of suffering and death. Thus it is not for those who cannot live with unsolved questions or unresolved doubts, whose bent of mind would reduce the fact of evil into something else or resolve it into some larger whole ... The tragic vision impels the man of action to fight against his destiny ... It is this sense of ancient evil, of ‚the blight man was born for,’ of the permanence and the mystery of human suffering ... The conflict between man and his destiny assumes once more the ultimate magnitude“ (S. 5 ff.).
„Inevitable spiritual dilemma or clash of loyalities“ (S.11); „the agony of dilemma, of the opposing compulsions of necessity and guilt“ (S. 21); „he who is caught between the necessity to act and the knowledge of inevitable guilt“ (S.19). ‚‚,Tragedy,‘ remarked Paul Tillich‚ ‚combines Guilt and Necessity,’ and the response of the hero is neither to yield to fatalism nor humble himself in total guilt, but to press on in his action to find by experience the truth of his own nature and of the nature of man“ (S. 72).
„It is ‚tragic‘ truth — that is, fragmentary, tentative, and precarious“ (S. 125).
„In the dialectical pressures‚ ‚the constant grinding conflict’ of the trilogy’s [the Oresteia’s] action, human character is revealed as no Greek before Aeschylus revealed it“ (S. 30).
„It is action entered into by choice and thus one which affirms man’s freedom. And it leads to suffering — but choice of a certain kind and suffering of a certain kind. The choice is not that of a clear good or clear evil; it involves both, in unclear mixture, and presents a dilemma. The suffering is not so much of physical ordeal (although this can be part of it) but of mental or spiritual anguish as the protagonist acts in the knowledge that what he feels he must do is in some sense wrong — as he sees himself at once both good and bad, justified yet unjustified“ (S. 47). „Tragedy is witness to the moral ambiguity of every action ... “(S.102).
„Greek tragedy simply takes place on two levels: the raw event occurs off stage; its psychological consequences are shown on stage. [The two are, as Aristotle has shown, effectively compartmentalized. As the personages move on and off stage — be it at the beginning or at the end of the drana, or in the course of the play itself — they pass from one psychological world to another. Before, after, and off stage is the world of instinctual acting out in great deeds. In that world there is neither unity of tine nor of place, because there is none in the world of the unconscious instinct representatives. Neither is there decorum, lofty seemliness (semnos), or ego control.] When coming on stage, the dramatic personage passes from the world of actualized instincts and fantasms into the world of conscious ego functions; going off stage, he plunges back into the depths of the unconscious and acts in accordance with its dictates“ (S. 63).
„The analysis of Aristotle’s inductively formulated ‚rules‘ of tragedy proves that he described the means used by great dramatic poets for regulating the affect triggered off by the plots of their tragedies. He shows that these means were complex, nuanced, tightly interlocking, and meshing sublimatory devices, closely patterned upon the temporal and spatial structure of the mind, only whose content is reflected in the plots themselves“ (S. 72).
„It is maintained that there is a vision of reality characteristic of psychoanalytic thought, and that this vision combines comic, romantic, tragic and ironic modes or partial visions“ (S. 295).
„The tragic vision is expressed in a keen responsiveness to the great dilemmas, paradoxes, ambiguities, and uncertainties pervading human action and subjective experience. It manifests itself in alertness to the inescapable dangers, terrors, mysteries, and absurdities of existence. It requires one to recognize the elements of defeat in victory and of victory in defeat; the pain in pleasure and the pleasure in pain; the guilt in apparently justified action; the loss of opportunities entailed by every choice and by growth in any direction; the inevitable clashes between passion and duty ...[The person with a tragic sense of life knows ...] the necessity to act in ignorance and bear the fear and guilt of action, the burden of unanswerable questions and incomprehensible afflictions, the probability of suffering while learning or changing, and the frequency with which it is true that only in the greatest adversity do men realize themselves most fully . . . “ (S. 285).
„This internal split or opposition is essential to the tragic vision, according to which the protagonist is inevitably divided within himself, some of his rights, values, duties, and opportunities necessarily clashing with others, and his choice consequently always entailing sacrifice, ambivalence, and remorse, if not guilt“ (S. 286).
„The tragic vision aims at seeing the momentous aspects and implications of events and people; it values total involvement and great crises; wherever it looks it focuses on the simultaneous presence or interlocking of the noble and the demonic, the greatest achievement and the greatest waste, pity and terror, complete being and complete annihilation“ (S. 293).
„The compulsion to repeat ... lacks the quality of a tragic phenomenon, however, owing to its repudiation of time and change, and its denial of the wilful, pleasurable and reassuring elements of the repetitions ... the tragic vision is an accomplishment in the ego system“ (S. 290).
„Ki chitze Schaddai immadi ascher chamatam schota ruchi“ (Hiob, VI, 4).
„Sch’ma-na weanochi adabber esch’alcha wehodi’eni“ (Ijov, XLII,4).
„Horuni wa’ani acharisch, umah-schagiti havinu li!“ (VI, 24).
„... we’im-lemischpat mi yo’ideni? Im eztaq, pi jarschi’eni, tam ani wayya’qscheni. Tam ani! Lo-eda nafschi, em’ass chayai. Achat-hi! Al-ken amarti tam werasha hu mechalléh!“
Rén néng hóng dào, feī dào hóng rén. (Analects, 15.28. Im hier wiedergegebenen Verständnis des Satzes folge ich v. a. Wing-Tsit Chans bersetzung in The Chinese mind).
Dies ist das Wesen der Neurose, die, wie ich in den anderen Werken ausgeführt habe, auch die heute oft als Borderlinepathologie und als Probleme des Narzißmus herausgelösten und abgetrennten Fälle umschließt. Diese stellen die Probleme der Neurose lediglich in radikalerer, nicht in prinzipiell anderer Form dar.
Glatzer übersetzt den entscheidenden Abschnitt sehr schön: „If it is the world you seek, there can be no justice; and if it is justice you seek, there can be no world. Why do you grasp the rope by both ends, seeking both the world and justice? Let one of them go, for if you do not relent a little, the world cannot endure.“ Die Soncino-Übersetzung (Freedman) spricht von „absoluter Gerechtigkeit“, „there can be no absolute justice“. Das Original ist klipp und klar, die Glatzersche Übersetzung richtig.
Damit soll auch keineswegs die Rolle der frühkindlichen Sexualität geschmälert werden. In all diesen Konflikten spielen sexuelle Wünsche und Phantasien eine große Rolle.
Bù huàn rén zhi bù ji zhi, huàn bù zhi rén yě (Confucian Analects, Hrsg. und Übers.: J. Legge; dt. Übersetzung von R. Wilhelm, 1.16).
Zhǔ zhōng xn (Analects‚ 1.8.2).
Ich bemühte mich in der Übersetzung des chinesischen Texts, so wortgetreu wie möglich zu bleiben, doch ließ ich mich auch von den Übersetzungen durch Chan, Gibbs und der ClassenAusgabe nach Sumitomo leiten.
„Bo beschalom, rabbi wetalmidi — rabbi bechochma, wetalmidi scheqibbalta devarai“. S. in diesem Zusammenhang auch die Auseinandersetzung zwischen Rabbi Gamliel und Rabbi Jehoschua in bezug auf das Abendgebet im Talmud, Berachot, 27 b/28 a, mit dem gleichen Ausgang.
Im Traktat Nezikin‚ 18 wird dies wiederholt thematisiert: „chavivin hagerim — geliebt sind die Fremden“, denn es heiße: „Liebet den Fremden“ (Deut.10.19).
„Denn dieses Gesetz, das ich dir heute gebe, ist für dich nicht zu schwer und nicht zu ferne. Nicht im Himmel ist, daß du sagen könntest: Wer steigt uns in den Himmel hinauf, um es uns zu holen und uns zu verkünden, daß wir darnach tun?“ (5. Mose, 30.11 f.).
„Kol hasche’arim nin’alim chutz mischa’arei ona’ah“. Ich folgte in meiner Übersetzung z. T. den englischen Fassungen im Midrash Reader von Glatzer und der Soncino-Ausgabe von Epstein. Das letzte Wort „Ona’ah“ wurde von Epstein als verwundete Gefühle übersetzt. Die gewöhnliche Bedeutung ist Täuschung, Betrug, Verhehlung; das ihm verwandte Wort „Awen“ bedeutet Unrecht, Ungerechtigkeit, Unheil, und „On“ Trauer, Schmerz. Ich denke, daß die vielfachen Bedeutungen des Wortes „Verleugnung“ vielleicht dem Sinn hier nahekommen, ist es hier doch auch Täuschung, Unrecht und Nichtanerkennung, die alle mit hineinspielen; doch wenn der breitere Zusammenhang der Stelle, namentlich auch der eröffnende Mischnaabschnitt mitberücksichtigt wird, ist es die hier gegebene Übersetzung, die wohl der Bedeutung am nächsten kommt.
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© 1989 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Wurmser, L. (1989). Der Schrei nach Gerechtigkeit — Das Tragische in der Kultur. In: Die zerbrochene Wirklichkeit. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-00919-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-00919-2_3
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