Raising the floor: the difference between the pitiful and the tragic

Pity is compassion that we can't stand; we even begin to resent the object of pity in self defense against the intolerable feelings that it gives rise to.

Agreed... The slave and slave master are both slaves...The capitalist and worker are both slaves, and together or alone neither has a chance of approaching freedom as an ideal...The progress of one impedes the common progress of both, because all the gains of the one are undermined by their very success at the ruin of the other... We all have to go into the future together, and everyone wants to get there first; and shut the door behind them...

Perhaps the proletarian tragedy would be the factory hand to tried to start a union and wakes up dead. This would add the hero element. For me, this is the leap from the pitiful to the tragic. The camera, or the writer, could focus on the rule rather than the exception, the obedient slave, but this might simply be painful. We would have a documentary on our hands. If we add the salt of rebellion, struggle, etc., I think we get some tragedy. I have also found this sort of issue fascinating. It seems that great art is inseparable from religion in the looser sense of transcendent value. This also ties into Kojeve, as the master is one who sacrifices his biological being for recognition, for an ideal. The slave is one who refuses to risk his life, and instead comes up with Skepticism, Stoicism, Christianity, to ameliorate this indignity. Of course the slave has a point. What good is recognition if one is too dead to enjoy it? Perhaps it's better to live and dream of freedom.... As you may know already, the master-slave dichotomy is synthesized by the universal homogeneous state, a classless democracy, etc. But Kojeve was a Marxist, it seems, and he also talks about men becoming the slaves of their economic pseudo-selves, the slaves of their own capital. They sacrifice/defer "biological"/sensual pleasure for the abstract/spiritual pleasure of having lots o money.

This is how a Nero comes to power. The ruling class is abstract and monetary, no longer warlike enough to resist such tyranny. Spengler also stressed that Rome could not be understood without the concept of high finance, etc. I can hardly claim mastery, as far as history goes. There's too much information out there. Not enough time.

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I think Nietzsche is righter about tragedy than Aristotle, but that may be because Nietzsche is a fellow Faustian. I think it's worth comparing Shakespeare with Sophocles. Shakespeare shows the transformation of characters to a greater degree. In Sophocles, we may get a reversal from Creon, for instance, but Shakespeare offers us a transformation like King Lear's. An utter and terrible transformation. A tragedy of character as much as of event.

I also think that to concentrate only on fear and pity is to miss a crucial element. From what I've read, Greek tragedy evolved from religious ritual. Tragedy involved the "Gods."

I can see why you would put Nietzsche on the stage. But I think he was also a good audience.

For Marx as for Hegel cultural progress consists in transferring problems to higher and more inclusive levels. But there are always problems. "History," he says "has no other way of answering old questions than by putting new ones." Under communism man ceases to suffer as an animal and suffers as human. He therewith moves from the plane of the pitiful to the plane of the tragic.
- Sidney Hook
- Towards an understanding of Karl Marx p. 175