On Tragedy, Poetry and Justice
In the late eight-century BCE, the Hebrew prophet Amos spoke on behalf of YHVH and instructed the people of Israel to, “Hate evil, love goodness and establish justice at all entrances. Perhaps then YHVH, the God of the hosts, will show favor to the remnant of Joseph.”[1] Upon opening the Hebrew Tanakh, one may turn to nearly any passage and find that this collection of holy texts is overwhelmingly concerned with mishpat, the performance of “justice.” Indeed, the word mishpat appears over 400 times in the Tanakh, compared with only nine times for the Greek analogs of krisis and dike in the New Testament.[2] In this respect, one may say that the Hebrew-Jewish tradition is one devoted to facilitating an establishment of justice on Earth, with the Laws of Moses forming the cornerstone. This decalogical approach to justice – the attempt to establish justice through the legally established ethical code of the Hebrew-speaking population of ancient Palestine – was not simply a contractual agreement among the people of Israel, but a literal covenant between Israel’s descendents and El, the Holy One.[3] This emphasis on an eternal law, imparted by an eternal and unchanging god, was the key difference between the Hebrew culture and those cultures that surrounded them in all directions. That is not to say, of course, that other contemporary cultures were not devoted to justice but, rather, that these cultures included understandings of justice that differed both in its source and its measuring. Though all cultural impressions of justice from the ancient world – the Hebrews included – contained elements that were constructed out of social necessity, there were also philosophers in Athens that understood a justice that was neither metaphysical, nor anthropological in nature.
These men understood justice in the concept of dike: the dice-roll, a measure dispensed by physis.[4] This dikaiophysis cannot be acquired, controlled or even understood by humankind. [5] The observations of these Athenian philosophers led them to understand that physis – simply by being – moves, builds energy, stores it and releases it as needed. To impose a human morality or ethical judgment to the behavior of the kosmos is not only inappropriate, but also ultimately fruitless.[6] Without assigning a consciousness to it, they simply understood that physis will simply do as it requires regardless of the human life that may be affected by it. This necessary collection and dispersion of energy and matter is neither benevolent nor malevolent, nor is it ambivalent either: it simply is.
Perhaps one of the best examples of this kind of thinking can be found in the tragoida of Sophocles, particularly the trilogy of Oedipus Tyrannus. In his Oedipal tragedy, one of the themes that Sophocles appears intent on establishing is a healthy skepticism of the new mathesis school of thought that would attempt to fit the raw deinos power of physis into a neat and orderly mathematical form.[7] This comes as a stern warning against the seductive belief that the anthropos can observe a formula that will tame physis and produce a more “just” environment for the flourishing of human civilization. He is also quick to show that mathesis is not the only tool that man would use to subvert nature, but that men like Oedipus would also use logos.[8] Sophocles would have us know that while the power of logos does enable humankind to transfer our understanding of physis to one another, it can also behave as the mechanism that allows physis to hide itself. It would not be inappropriate to suggest that the one apparatus that humankind can point to as our key to unlocking the mysteries of the Universe was produced for us by physis to veil our understanding of it. As Teiresias said, “Of themselves things will come, although I hide them and breathe no word of them.”[9] In the last play of his trilogy, Antigone, Sophocles warns the anthropos about any attempt to escape the inevitable tragoida nature of life on Earth.[10] The tragedy of Sophocles is about strife and conflict, though it is not necessarily malicious in nature. As a form of worship to Dionysus, his tragedies involve the internal confrontation of our contradictory impulses and these conflicts are as inevitable as they are irreconcilable. This, of course, is the “tragedy” of it. Crudely stated, life – as we understand it – isn’t going to “work out” for us and we most certainly will not get out alive. The tragoidos that Sophocles presents before his audience is intended not only to provide a kind of entertainment, but also to mitigate any expectations of imported metaphysical justice while embracing the Dionysian virtue of affirming life in any form it chooses to present itself. Moreover, the conflict of Antigone can be understood as mirroring the conflict that the human being wages in her own life: a conflict between the inescapable immanence of physis and the heavenly ideals of nomos.[11] As often as the dike of physis finds itself subject to the various interpretations of the anthropos, the ideals of nomos are on much flimsier footing and the inevitable contradictions in those ideals can quickly put two individuals at odds with one another. Not only does Antigone reveal the nature of these conflicts between human conventions and human justice when she says, “I shall be a criminal – but a religious one”, but Sophocles crafts her revelations carefully near line 555 when she concedes that her sister was “right in the eyes of one, and I in the other”.[12] Antigone’s defiant declarations expose this human belief in the metaphysical “trump card” when she tells Creon, “Yes, it was not Zeus that made the proclamation; nor did Justice, which lives with those below, that enacts such laws as that, for mankind. I did not believe your proclamation had such power to enable one who will someday die to override God’s ordinances, unwritten and secure”.[13] This dike of Sophocles, however, does not decide who is right or wrong in the matter of human affairs. One would even be warranted in suggesting that the justice of human affairs is not found in the quid pro quo reciprocity of the law, but in the natural tension that exists between two opposing or contradictory forces. Furthermore, this tension between two forces or two people – which cannot be grasped or made to settle into a firm mold – may be thought of as a pattern of ebb and flow in an unceasing exchange of energy. Indeed, any attempts to manipulate or circumvent this tension may leave us like Creon who – only after calamity has struck his family – admits to “the awful blindness of those plans of mine”, to which the chorus in Sophocles’ play answers, “I think you have learned justice – but only too late”.[14] In the final lines of Antigone, Sophocles’ Chorus leaves the audience with the sobering advice to, “Pray for no more at all. For what is destined for us, men mortal, there is no escape.” To the Athenian mind of Sophocles, physis will measure out to each of us what is just and no appeal to the nomos of metaphysis will help any of us escape it.[15]
The careful reader may now be asking herself what she can make of this dikaiophysis in a world where the decalogical ethics of the Judeo-Christian tradition seems so inescapable. The uneasy tension between the modes of “justice” for Athens and Jerusalem is, perhaps, best seen in the poems of Paul Celan. As a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, Celan not only embodies the victim of tragedy and injustice, but also exemplifies the classical tension between the Greco-European and the Hebrew-Oriental traditions. His poetry – influenced heavily by Greco-German philosophy, Jewish Messianic expectation and the ultimate tragedy of Ha-Shoah – confronts the aporia of these questions in a subtle, yet unapologetic fashion that brings his internal conflict and angst into full view.[16] Like many Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Celan was faced with what may be ultimately unanswerable questions about the inherent nature of humankind, the benevolence of divinity towards humankind, and what constitutes justice between men. In the Hebrew tradition, the Decalogical Law of Moses represents the formulaically ethical path to a concrete and metaphysically imported justice.
The five-line poem “In Rivers” touches this idea most directly where Celan writes, “In rivers north of the future / I cast the net you / haltingly weight / with stonewritten / shadows.” While there are certainly interpretations that are more faithful to Celan’s intent than others, his poems can be read in a number of different ways. I would offer a reading of this poem that draws on all three previously mentioned themes: Greco-German philosophy, Jewish Messianic expectation and Ha-Shoah.[17] As with Hölderlinian poetry, rivers can be understood both as vehicles for the passage of time, but also as thresholds: not only in a geographical sense, but also with regards to both the separation and gathering of life and death, the spheres of the mortal and the divine. These rivers “north of the future” not only establish a tense and chiastic relationship between chronos and kairos time in the poem, but also set up a foundation for the sense of longing that Celan intends to communicate.[18] At these rivers he casts the net, an allusion to the fisherman apostles of Christianity but also an exercise of faith in the face of hopelessness; not only in the sense of the apostles leaving their nets behind to follow Jesus, but it also refers to the two times that Jesus instructed his apostles to cast their nets and were greatly rewarded for their obedience and faith.[19] The nets, however, were “hesitantly burdened” (zögernd beshwerst) with “stonewritten shadows.” This line provides a unique window into Celan’s poetic genius, as the careful reader may be able to make out deliberate allusions not only to the Decalogue, but the teachings of Plato, Jesus and Nietzsche as well. Plato understood the best ideals of human life to be but “shadows” of the eternal light of the divine. As for the Christian imagery in this line, one might remember that Jesus calls his “net” or “yoke” a “light burden” that makes the schwergewicht of the “stonewritten” Law of Moses a mere shadow of itself.[20] Celan also seems to make use of this Platonic teaching only to turn it on its proverbial ear by showing how crushingly heavy even the shadow of that which is “stonewritten” in Judaism has proved to be on the Jewish people in history. Yet it is this schwergewicht that is precisely the kind of burden that – as Nietzsche claimed in his novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra – was ripe for the teeth of “the Lion”. In this way, Nietzsche seemed to argue that the burdens of metaphysical convention weigh down the human being and distance it from an appropriate relationship with physis, keeping her – as Heidegger might say – “homeless.” While this five-line poem does seem to convey a message of disillusionment with the Decalogue of Judaic religious and cultural tradition, it may go too far to suggest that Celan has no faith in the Hebrew tradition of justice that attempts to place the “the other” in an experiential relationship with “the self.”
Similarly, in the nine-line Jerusalem poem, “There Stood”, Celan notes the surroundings of he and his erotic companion, “There stood / a splinter of fig on your lip, / there stood / Jerusalem around us, / there stood / the bright pine scent / above the Danish skiff we thanked, / I stood / in you.” In the first three stanzas, Celan observes – an act that distances him from those objects. He is distanced from the lip of his companion, from the whole city of Jerusalem surrounding him, and even from the scents of pine. But his distance evaporates by the final stanza when he writes, “I stood in you.” Not only is there an erotic function of this rhetorical device – and it should not be ignored – but there is also a subtle philosophical worldview revealed here. One of the foundational principles of justice in the Judeo-Hebrew tradition instructs men to “practice love for the other, for you were once an other in a strange land.”[21] By standing in the “other”, Celan is affirming the ethical attempt to navigate, and close, that invisible distance between the “self” and the “other” while – as we saw earlier – not relying on decalogical metaphysics.[22] Indeed, while many in theological history may have treated his ethical teachings as “irrelevant” when compared to the dominant “atonement” theologies that sprouted up after his death, it seems that Jesus may have anticipated this non-decalogical Hebrew ethics in his own life.[23] The mere suggestion that one could simply collapse the hundreds and thousands of commandments in the Torah (and the accompanying Talmud) into a simple observation of loving “the other as you love your self”, was both scandalous and radical in the first century and, to some, it still is.[24]
Readers of Celan may also recognize this merging of self and other through the lens of dikaiophysis in the poem “I Drink Wine” as he writes, “I drink wine from two glasses / and plow away at / the king’s caesura / like that one / at Pindar, / God turns in his tuning fork / as one among the least / of the Just, / the lottery drum spills / our two bits.”[25] As with Celan’s other poems, these ten lines contain enough potential meanings to fill a dozen pages. One might make a successful reading of Celan claiming to “drink wine from two glasses” as a recognition of his dual heritage, both Jewish and German. The fact that he “[plows] away at the king’s caesura” may suggest not only that he recognizes no natural break between his German and Jewish heritage in the same way that Pindar recognized no natural break between poet and priest. Further on in the poem, Celan claims that “God turns in his tuning fork as one among the least of the Just” which, in my reading, shows God relinquishing this tuning fork – a metaphor for the skeptron of justice – that produces an initial tension and dissonance between two pitches and eventually fades into one authoritative pitch.[26] Not only does God relinquish this skeptron, but he does so “as one among the least of the Just” suggesting that the kind of justice that was produced by the Law is – in some way – insufficient or, perhaps, that God, himself, is the least of the Just. In the end, it appears that Celan has returned – in full Hölderlinian fashion – to the somber warning of the Sophoclean Chorus in Antigone when he concedes that, “aus der Lostrommel fällt / unser Deut” (“the lottery wheel spills our two parts”). The “lottery wheel”, in my reading, is to be understood as a modern analog to the “dice-roll” of dikaiophysis, measuring out what it finds necessary. Yet from this lottery wheel falls the two parts of Celan, Deutsche and Deuteronomy: German and Jew, oppressor and oppressed, murderer and victim.[27]
When attempting to navigate this suspended tension between two worlds – this Janusian threshold of justice that can neither be circumvented nor pierced – we may find only more contradictions, more conflict, and more tension than we expected or desired. How can we separate our tradition of ethics from the arbitrary lottery-wheel of physis and see justice outside of an anthropocentric mode of thinking?[28] What claims on justice can we hope to make in light of such an unspeakable tragedy as Ha-Shoah and who can hope to make them? Does that light forever cast “stonewritten shadows” on the schwergewicht of our human convention: our laws and our ethics? When even the most brilliant minds are unable to find a point of reconciliation between the Athenian dike and the Hebrew mishpat, the endeavor presents itself as hopelessly daunting to the rest of us. If we begin to recognize that the human being can never approach the event of justice, should that then discourage us from even trying? Do we punish those that violate the polis as Creon did, or do we leave this task to physis?[29] Would we even be satisfied with the kind of justice that physis, or the gods, provide? After all, as Jesus once said, “[God] causes the Sun to rise both on the righteous and the wicked, and makes the rain to fall on the just as well as the unjust.”[30] In the end, our yearning and hoping for justice may be – like logos and mathesis – simply a mechanism by which physis keeps the human being from transgressing the dangerous threshold that only our priests, prophets and poets may even hesitantly approach.
[4] Dike – Greek for “justice”; Physis, Greek for “that which comes of its own power” or, crudely, “nature”
[5] I use the word dikaiophysis to represent “the justice of the natural universe” or to approximate the meaning of “that form of justice which has no causal relationship to the efforts of human beings”
[7] Mathesis – Greek root word for the English “mathematics”; Deinos, Greek for “that which is terrible and wonderful simultaneously”
[8] Logos – Greek for “word, language or idea”, represented here as the mechanism of communication between humans
[9] Greene, David, and Richard Lattimore. "Oedipus the King." Sophocles I - Second Edition. 1942. Reprint. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1991. 9-76. Print, p. 24 : 341 (emphasis added).
[10] Tragoida – Greek for “goat song” and a form of worship for Dionysus, the god of both revelry and “tragedy”
[11] Nomos – Greek word approximating “all forms of human convention, including law, custom and cultural norms”
[12] Greene, David, and Richard Lattimore. "Antigone." Sophocles I - Second Edition. 1942. Reprint. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1991. 9-76. Print, pp. 164 : 75, 183 : 555.
[15] Metaphysis – Greek meaning “after or above physis”, used here to reflect the concept of the “supernatural”
[16] Ha-Shoah, meaning “great calamity” and the Hebrew analog to the Greek word holókauston (“holocaust”); aporia – Greek meaning “impassible”
[17] Celan, Paul. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. 1952. Reprint. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. Print, p. 227.
[18] I used the word “chiastic” to illustrate an “x”-shaped relationship between two contradictory forces; Kairos – Greek for festal time; Chronos – Greek for chronological time
[21] Deuteronomy 10:19; Use of the word “other” in this passage is a revised translation of the Hebrew ger, meaning “alien, foreigner, outsider”
[22] I use the word “ethical” here, not in the original Greek sense of “habit” or “habitat”, but in the post-modern and popular sense of ethics as “a personal mode of conduct that governs interpersonal relations”
[23] Baldwin, George W. A Political Reading of the Life of Jesus. New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2006. Print.
[24] Matthew 19:18-19; Use of the word “other” in this passage is a revised translation from the Greek plesion, meaning both “friend” and “any other person”
[25] Celan, Paul. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. 1952. Reprint. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. Print, p. 367.
[26] Skeptron – Greek word meaning “stick, staff or scepter” as seen, perhaps, with both Oedipus and Moses
[27] Bold lettering superimposed in this sentence to emphasize the presence of the German word deut in Celan’s poem having the triple meaning of “bits” or “parts”, “German” and “Deuteronomy”
[28] I use the word “anthropocentric” to denote a worldview that places the human being as central in the world
[30] Matthew 5:45; the words “just” and “unjust” are translated from the Greek dikaios and adikos, respectively
2 comments:
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