TRAGEDY AND PHILOSOPHY OTHER BOOKS BY WALTER KAUFMANN Nietzsche (1950; 3d rev. and enl. ed., 1968) Critique of Religion and Philosophy (1958) From Shakespeare to Existentialism (1959; rev. and enl. ed., 1060) The Faith of a Heretic (1961) Hegel (1965) VERSE Goethe's Faust: A New Translation (1961) Cain and Other Poems (1962) Twenty Gennan Poets (1962) TRANSLATED AND EDITED Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (1956) Judaism and Christianity: Essays by Leo Baeck (1958) Philosophic Classics (2 vols., 1961, rev. and enl., 1968) Religion from Tolstoy to Camus (1961) Hegel: Texts and Commentary (1966) NIETZSCHE TRANSLATIONS The Portable Nietzsche (1954: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Nietzsche contra Wagner) Beyond Good and Evil, with Commentary (1966) The Birth of Tragedy & The Case of Wagner,' with Commentary (1967) On The Genealo8Y of Morals & Ecce Homo, with Commentary (1967) The Will to Power, with Commentary (1967) TRAGEDY AND PHILOSOPHY Walter Kaufmann PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 Copyright © 1968 by Walter Kaufmann; All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Card No. 78-73428 ISBN 0-691-02005-1 (paperback) Originally published in hardcover edition by Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1968; Anchor Books edition, 1969 First Princeton Paperback printing, 1979; Princeton University Press edition reissued, 1992 10 9 8 7 6 The selection from Richmond Lattimore's translation of The Odyssey, Book XI, is quoted with the permission of Harper & Row, Inc. The lines quoted from E. V. Rieu's prose version of The Iliad are by permission of Penguin Books, Ltd. The material from The Complete Greek Tragedje~" edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, is incorporated with the permission of the University of Chicago Press. The short quotations from On Poetry and Style are by permission of The Bobbs-Merrill Company. From Aristotle: On Poetry and Style, translated by C.M.A. Crube, copyright 1958 by The Liberal Arts Press, Inc .• reprinted by permission of The Liberal Arts Press Division of the Babbs-Merrill Company, Inc. Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Printed in the United States of America FOT my son DAVID [...]... always been tragedy and philosophy, and as if tragedy had always been like this, and philosophy like that In fact, many widely shared assumptions about tragedy fail to fit some of the best Greek tragedies, and philosophy is DO single entity either Western philosophy was born early in the sixth century B.C., and tragedy less than a hundred years later These dates suggest rather misleadingly that philosophy. .. why one thinks that he was wrong and then to present one's own views I began to develop my own ideas in Critique of Religion and Philosophy, and in Tragedy and Philosophy my critique of philosophy is carried further In this book I do not merely consider and criticize the doctrines about tragedy found in Plato and Aristotle, Hume and Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Scheler, but I call into question... great deal and recited his poems, of which only a few fragments survive-including one on the poets and sev~ era} on religion: "Homer and Hesiod ascribed to the gods whatever is infamy and reproach among men: theft and adultery and deceiving each other." ((Mortals suppose that the gods are born and have clothes and voices and shapes like their own." 4tBut if oxen, horses, and lions had hands or could...PREFACE (1979) I am delighted that the Princeton University Press is bringing together under its imprint several of my books The relation of Tragedy and Philosophy to Nietzsche and Critique of Religion and Philosophy makes this even more gratifying In my Nietzsche I considered it my duty to present his ideas Some philosophers,... for Greek tragedy, and I prefer a different lesson: most efforts in this direction have been none too successful, but there is a widely felt need for seeing together materials that are too often considered apart 2 My central aim is to develop a sound and fruitful approach to tragedy, try it out, and thus illuminate Greek tragedy and some problems relating to the possibility and actuality of tragedy in... it was Socrates who raised the question; and his heirs, Plato and Aristotle, never seem to have doubted when they wrote at length about tragedy that, of course, they were wiser than the tragic poets It would be appealing to consider Socrates and Sophocles as symbols of different styles of life and thought and creativity, by way of juxtaposing philosophy and tragedy; but actually Sophocles' world view... to /4Homer and the Birth of Tragedy, " both to show how my approach can be applied to The Iliad and to furnish a much needed background for an understanding of Aeschylus, Sophocles~ and Euripides, who are considered in the next three chapters There is no stopping at this point We have to see how Aristotle's and Hegel's ideas about tragedy, so far considered only in conjunction with Greek tragedy, fare... Oedipus and my conceptions of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and of the death of tragedy- all diametrically opposed to Nietzsche's views-struck me as far more interesting and important than my definition of tragedy For that matter, some of the other aspects of the new poetics advanced in Chapter III also seemed more significant to me than a mere definition In retrospect it seems to me that Tragedy and. .. the greatest tragedians; their kind of philosophy was shaped in part by the development of trag~ I Plato: The Rival as Critic edy The evolution that led from Aeschylus to Sophocles and Euripides was in a sense continued by Plato Aeschylus stands halfway between Homer and Plato, and Euripides halfway between Aeschylus and Plato Plato's attitude toward tragedy~ and to some extent Aristotle's as well,... has been inspired by a vision of another kind of philosophy This was surely obvious from the beginning For all my differences with Nietzsche and Hegel, my books on them left no doubt about my admiration for their daring And in Tragedy and Philosophy I write mainly about what I love and find beautiful Sinee this book first appeared, I have not taught tragedy While working on it, I did a few times Once, . Commentary (1967) TRAGEDY AND PHILOSOPHY Walter Kaufmann PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New. was wrong and then to present one's own views. I began to develop my own ideas in Critique of Religion and Philosophy, and in Tragedy and Philosophy my critique of philosophy. to develop a sound and fruitful approach to tragedy, try it out, and thus illuminate Greek tragedy and some problems relating to the possibility and actuality of tragedy in our time.