References
- Sections 1–2 were written by Stefano Marino, while sections 3–4 were written by Carlo Gentili. The authors would like to thank Dr. Jerome Veith (Seattle University) for his precious help in the revision and correction of the text
- W. Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics. Vol. 1: Ancient Aesthetics, trans. A. and A. Czerniawski, The Hague-Paris: Mouton 1970, 138.
- For a general overview and an analysis of the main modern and contemporary philosophical interpretations of tragedy and the tragic, see C. Gentili and G. Garelli, Il tragico, Bologna: il Mulino 2010, 111ff.
- P. Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, trans. P. Fleming, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2002, 1.
- This dearth of attention finds expression, for example, in the absence of any entry for “tragedy” or “the tragic” in C. Lawn and N. Keane, The Gadamer Dictionary (London-New York: Continuum 2011), as well as in the fact that almost no contribution in the many collections dedicated to Gadamer in the last decades specifically deals with the role of tragedy and the tragic in his hermeneutics.
- See H.-G. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke (hereafter: GW), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1985–1995, 10 vols. All translations of essays from GW are the authors’ own, unless otherwise noted.
- H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (hereafter: TM), trans. J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall, London-New York: Continuum 2004, xxxii.
- H.-G. Gadamer, In Conversation: Reflections and Commentary (hereafter: IC), trans. R.E. Palmer, New Haven-London: Yale University Press 2001, 53.
- F. Bianco, Pensare l'interpretazione. Temi e figure dell'ermeneutica contemporanea, Roma: Editori Riuniti 1992, 110.
- D. Barbaric, “Die Grenze zum Unsagbaren“, in Hans-Georg Gadamer: Wahrheit und Methode, ed. byG. Figal, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2007, 213.
- G.L. Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient & Modern, New Haven-London: Yale University Press 1992, 183.
- See Aeschylus, Agamemnon, v. 177, in The Oresteia, trans. I. Johnston, Arlington: Richer Resources Publications 2007, 13.
- See D. Di Cesare, Gadamer. Ein philosophisches Porträt, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2009, 131.
- TM 351. On the peculiar, close relationship that Gadamer identifies between aesthetic and religious experience, see H.-G. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (hereafter: RB), trans. N. Walker, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986, 140–153.
- Pearl Jam, Love Boat Captain (Lyrics: Eddie Vedder. Music: Eddie Vedder and Boom Gaspar): from the album Riot Act, Epic Records 2002.
- See TM, 362–381. It is no coincidence that the section on the logic of question and answer is placed at the end of the chapter on the analysis of historically effected consciousness that also contains the section on the concept of experience and the essence of hermeneutic experience, and Gadamer is very clear in claiming both that “historically effected consciousness […] has the structure of experience” (TM, 341), as well as that “the openness essential to experience”, for its part, “has the structure of a question” (TM, 356).
- See G.L. Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient & Modern, 179–194. Other interesting contributions on Gadamer's concept of tragedy and the tragic are those provided by L. Bottani, Il tragico e la filosofia, Vercelli: Mercurio Edizioni 2008, 367–390, and D.L. Tate, “Transcending the Aesthetic: Gadamer on Tragedy and the Tragic”, in Theological Aesthetics After Von Balthasar, ed. byO.V. Bychkov and J. Fodor, Aldershot-Burlington: Ashgate 2008, 35–50.
- G.L. Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient & Modern, 183–187.
- TM, 387, 341, 336.
- H.-G. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (hereafter: PH), trans. D.E. Linge, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press 1976, 10.
- To be precise, Gadamer charges both Aristotle and Hegel of having conceived experience only in regard to knowledge and only in terms of its result, thus ignoring the fact that experience is basically a process that “has its proper fulfilment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself’ (TM 349–350).
- We follow here a brilliant insight into Gadamer's interpretation of Greek tragedy provided by G. Bonanni, “Che cos'è un'esperienza ermeneutica?”, in Gadamer: bilanci e prospettive, ed. byM. Gardini and G. Matteucci, Macerata: Quodlibet 2004, 31–46.
- See GW 9, 152–154.
- J. Grondin, “On the Composition of Truth and Method‘, trans. L.K. Schmidt, in The Specter of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue, and Phronesis in Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. byL.K. Schmidt, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1995, 31.
- “The experience of art should not be falsified by being turned into a possession of aesthetic culture”, Gadamer explains, “for all encounter with the language of art is an encounter with an unfinished event and is itself part of this event. This is what must be emphasized against aesthetic consciousness and its neutralization of the question of truth” (TM 85).
- C. Lawn and N. Keane, The Gadamer Dictionary, 109–110. On the central role played by the concept of Spiel in Gadamer’ s aesthetics and philosophy of language, see S. Marino, Fusioni di orizzonti. Saggi su estetica e linguaggio in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Roma: Aracne 2012, 139–163.
- TM 105, 103. In fact, just like we cannot find an answer to the question concerning the nature of play itself “if we look for it in the player's subjective reflection”, since “the mode of being of play does not allow the player to behave toward play as if toward an object”, so “the work of art is not an object that stands over against a subject for itself’, and then even “the ‘subject’ of the experience of art […] is not the subjectivity of the person who experiences it but the work itself’ (TM 103). On the persistent tendency, ever since the Greeks, and then especially with Kant and Schiller, “to link the experience of art with the concept of play”, see also RB 127–130.
- C. Lawn and N. Keane, The Gadamer Dictionary, 142.
- J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Boston: Beacon Press 1955, 14.
- Ibid., 42. In this context, it is worthy of notice, I think, that Horkheimer and Adorno actually express a similar idea: “Art has in common with magic the postulation of a special, self- contained sphere removed from the context of profane existence. Within it special laws prevail. Just as the sorcerer begins the ceremony by marking out from all its surroundings the place in which the sacred forces are to come into play, each work of art is closed off from reality by its own circumference” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2002, 13–14).
- TM 109. With regard to this aspect, one should point out that an analogous “mediation” takes place in the chorus of Attic tragedy, and it is on this basis that Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, finally accepts “the deeper meaning of Schlegel's concept [of] the chorus [as] the ‘ideal spectator’”, and thus writes: “the audience of Attic tragedy identified itself with the chorus on the orchestra, so that there was fundamentally no opposition between public and chorus; the whole is just one sublime chorus, either of dancing and singing satyrs, or of those who allow themselves to be represented by these satyrs” (F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. R. Speirs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999, 42).
- See F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus, in Werke. Vol. 1, ed. byM. Schröter, München: Beck 1979, 205–265.
- R.J. Foster, The Creativity of Nature: The Genesis of Schelling's Naturphilosophie 1775–1799, Ann Arbor: Pro Quest 2009, 117f.
- See Plutarch, Quaestiones conviviales, I, I, 5 (615 a).
- J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (hereafter: MTAG), trans. J. Lloyd, New York: Zone Books 1988, 182–183.
- Aristotle, Poetics, IV, 1449 a 10–11, trans. I. Bywater, in The Complete Works of Aristotle. Vol. 2, ed. byJ. Barnes, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1991, 2319.
- From this point of view, Vernant's conception is reminiscent of Schiller's famous Mannheim Speech, inasmuch as Vernant's original interpretation of Greek tragedy seems to present some affinities with Schiller's concept of beautiful appearance (see F. Schiller, “Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?”, in Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 5, ed. byG. Fricke and H.G. Göpfert, München: Hanser 1993, in particular 823).
- TM 122. Gadamer refers here to G. Krüger, Einsicht und Leidenschaft. Das Wesen des platonischen Denkens, Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann 1963.
- TM 126. On the different translations of these Greek terms, see M. Fuhrmann, Einführung in die antike Dichtungstheorie, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1973, 91ff.
- Incidentally, this also implies that the idea of the Urtragödie the “music drama” that Nietzsche could only postulate but whose historical existence he could not demonstrate inevitably requires a comparison with the effective form assumed by the great tragedians’ works (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides).
- See Aristotle, Poetics, VI, 1449 b 27–28, trans. in The Complete Works of Aristotle. Vol. 2, 2320.
- H.R. Jauss, Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 1984, 173.
- M. Kommerell, Lessing und Aristoteles. Untersuchung über die Theorie der Tragödie, Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann 1970, 102.
- See J. Bernays, Grundzüge der verlorenen Abhandlung des Aristoteles über Wirkung der Trägodie, ed. byK. Gründer, Hildesheim-New York: Olms 1970, 48–49. On Bernays’ interpretation of Greek tragedy and, in particular, his influence on Nietzsche, see C. Gentili, Ermeneutica e metodica. Studi sulla metodologia del comprendere, Genova: Marietti 1996, 253–336.
- Euripides, The Bacchae, vv. 303–305, trans. P. Woodruff, Indianapolis-Cambridge: Hackett 1999, 12.
- Plato, Phaedo, 67 c-d, trans. G.M.A. Grube, in Complete Works, ed. byJ.M. Cooper, Indianapolis-Cambridge: Hackett 1997, 58.
- Plato, Phaedo, 67 d, trans. in Complete Works, 58.
- The very last paragraph of Truth and Method presents this idea as the humanistic counterpart, so to speak, to the methodology of the natural sciences: “The fact that in such knowledge [scil. the human sciences] the knower's own being comes into play certainly shows the limits of method, but not of science. Rather, what the tool of method does not achieve must—and really can—be achieved by a discipline of questioning and answering, a discipline that guarantees truth” (TM 484).