Why We Watch Suffering

Nobody schedules grief. Nobody arranges an evening of dread and pity for the pleasure of it. And yet people book tickets, in numbers, for performances whose entire content is grief, dread and pity, and then report the evening as one of the better ones they have had. That is the paradox of tragedy, and any theory of art that cannot say something about it is not really a theory of art.

Aristotle's answer is catharsis, a word that appears once in the Poetics and is never explained, which has kept commentators employed for two millennia. The medical reading takes it as purgation: the emotions are aroused and discharged, and you leave lighter than you came. The moral reading takes it as clarification: the emotions are trained, brought into proportion, educated by being exercised on a case where nothing is at stake for you. The text supports both and settles neither. What is clear is the shape: the painful emotions are genuinely felt, and the value lies in what feeling them does to the person who feels them.

Nietzsche thought all of this far too hygienic, and The Birth of Tragedy is his attempt to say what the Greeks were actually doing. His account turns on two forces he names after gods. Apollo is form, boundary, the individual figure, the dream image, the beautiful surface. Dionysus is intoxication, the dissolution of the boundary between yourself and everything else, the music and the chorus. His claim is that tragedy is the brief historical moment when both operate at full strength at once, and that it dies as soon as either is allowed to win.

The reason it matters is his diagnosis of what the Greeks were facing. They were not, in his reading, an untroubled sunny people; they were acutely aware that existence is largely suffering, that the innocent are destroyed, and that no account can be given which makes this come out right. Tragedy is what let them look at that without turning away. The surface is beautiful enough to be borne, and beneath it the music says that the individual whose destruction you are watching was never the point. Existence, on this view, is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon: the moral and metaphysical justifications having all failed.

Then he names a culprit for its death, and it is Socrates. The demand that everything be explicable, that virtue is knowledge and the examined life can be brought out right, is exactly what tragedy denies. Once drama has to answer to that demand, the chorus dwindles, motive replaces fate, suffering becomes a problem with a solution, and the form becomes argument. It is a wildly contestable piece of intellectual history. It is also the seed of everything Nietzsche wrote afterwards about what the pursuit of truth costs the people who pursue it.

Note what his account is not. It is not consolation by desert. Tragedy offers no reading on which Oedipus had it coming, and Nietzsche thinks any such reading is a betrayal of the form: the whole force of it is that the destruction is not deserved and not explicable. The consolation is aesthetic and nothing else, which is either the most honest position available or an evasion dressed as courage, depending on who is reading.

The argument is alive every time a film about an atrocity is praised for its beauty and a survivor objects that beauty is the wrong response. Nietzsche's side says transfiguration is the only thing that makes such material endurable, and that art which refuses it is not more honest, merely unwatchable. The objection says that making horror beautiful turns it into an experience an audience enjoys and then leaves, which is an insult wearing the clothes of a tribute. Neither position has an argument the other is obliged to accept, which is why the dispute recurs, in the same shape, with every new film.