Stay, moment, you are terrible: reinventing the philosophy of tragedy

Abstract

In order to be spoken, a tragic monologue which is the quintessence of any great tragedy, always required quite a special moment amidst action, approximately described as ‘stop-time’, ‘falling-out-of-time’ or ‘time-within-time’. This abruption of natural time-durance, formation of some strange lacuna in its usually monolith and constant flow, along with the strengthening of the emotional effect of such dramatic meditation by portraying it against the most depressing, uncomfortable or disastrous convulsions in the world around which seems to literally fall apart and leave the man to his own — was rarely regarded from the outside of dramatic art as a serious philosophical conception, a keystone event to present human self-awareness. Indeed, Plato already compared thinking (as a process) to the inner speech of soul communicating with itself (and thus knowing, noticing itself), and again, the same Plato suggested that to reach the real essence of things (which is the inborn aim of thinking), a human being must find itself on the breaking edge of existence where the material world is cast aside and the other world of godly truths starts to shine through — as it happens to the soldier Er in one of myths quoted in ‘Republic’, who seemingly fell in battle but as he lay neither dead nor alive his soul went to other planes to witness the divine order and then bring the knowledge of it back to people as Er resurrected. But the connection between the matrix of central elements in such enlightening tales (‘catastrophe of usual being’ — ‘transgression to some medium plane’ — ‘learning some all-changing truth there’ — ‘coming back to the world and oneself to speak the learnt to the people’), was never considered akin to that of the core elements of tragic climax. After Plato, Aristotle developed the idea that to think seriously we need a special time free of all else that storms our everyday lives — yet designing the laws of tragedy in ‘Poetics’, he didn’t ever let this intellectual transcendence counter the dramatic strives of actions and passions of its heroes (as well as the forth movement) although it was only one step away to admit their likelihood. The latter Christianity defiled tragedy as the way only to despair, and more to that, a theatrical illusion leading conscience astray. Only modern European thinkers from Pascal to Nietzsche and existentialists (with the significant help from outstanding authors like Shakespeare) brought back the notion of tragic to philosophical bloom again and re-presented the tragedy as one of the highest and most complicated arts devoted to human self-cognizance.