Suffering and Therapy; Tragedy and Comedy

Aphorisms on Limit and Infinity

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The Greek attitude to suffering is one of the distinctive characteristics of that civilization, and thus (perhaps) of Western civilization as a whole—should we prove equal to such an inheritance. They deified suffering, they ennobled it. The Buddhist seeks to escape it, the Confucian to prudently minimize it, the Abrahamic views suffering as a deserved punishment for sin and prays to his Lord for a merciful release from that suffering. Only the Greek is bold enough to seek out suffering as a terrible boon, knowing that nothing great is ever accomplished apart from it. As Pindar has it, for every blessing, the gods dish out a double portion of grief; the noble man wears the good side out, but the base cannot abide this. Or with Aeschylus we can say “we must suffer, suffer into truth”.

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Suffering trumps therapy. Suffering asks less of you than therapy, and gives you more. The therapeutic standpoint entails a continual obsession, the end of which one can never attain to. One is never healthy enough, or, if one is somehow healthy enough, then the danger of falling back into illness is continual. The Gospel’s “one thing needful” is the ultimate degree of the telos—it is a therapeutic obsession, the longing for and continual movement toward a state of final fixity in health—but the health of the therapeutically oriented is a negative one. It is a mere lack of illness, not an abundance and overflow of vitality. Suffering opens up to infinity, but therapy offers only finite benefits, and those are paltry. Moreover, these benefits are always rendered to us in the form of a debt. From the therapeutic standpoint, health is a debt that must be repaid by means of continual anxiety over ill-health, and, eventually, through death. Most are not willing to pay the double-price of admittance to the boons of suffering.

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“Suffering opens up to infinity”—what does this mean? To suffer is to experience a change, a transformation. When transformation is actively willed, a glimpse is offered into the unlimited openness of possibilities. One can choose this, or one can choose that, or the other thing—an endless array of possibilities glimpsed in imaginal space. Therapy limits one’s options by polarizing all possibilities into two avenues—the good, the healthy choice, on one side, and the the multitude of the bad, the unhealthy choices, on the other. To be sure, one cannot choose all possibilities, but one can glimpse them, one can taste them, one can imagine. There is an infinity present here, in the experience of voluntary suffering, occluded though it might be from corporeal actuality.

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The point of view of therapy presupposes a value standard given from above to which one must conform. One does not conform to the standard, therefore one is ill, broken, maladjusted; therefore one must be fixed in order to conform to it. Therapy is a Procrustean ethic. It is a willing or unconscious slavery to Zeus, to the force from above that determines values for us, that hands us an already-given “one thing needful”. “Torture and solitude, scorn and despair—these are my empire” says Prometheus—“more glorious far than that which thou surveyest from thine unenvied throne, O Mighty God”. And, is not religion the oldest form of therapy? According to Gimabattista Vico, religion precisely is the binding of Prometheus.

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The tragic is the principle of weight, the attribution of weightiness and seriousness to things. Comedy is the divestment of weight, the exorcism of seriousness. They demand each other. Tragedy always applies weight to the weightless, and comedy deflates the weighty. To the extent that anything in life appears weighty, it partakes of tragedy, even if only as a distant echo. This close alliance of tragedy and comedy is symbolized in Dionysus, who is considered the patron of both.

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Tragedy is forever destined to be mocked to derision by comedy, and comedy to be crushed under the heel of tragedy.

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Tragedian’s Paradox: there is nothing in the world worthy of being taken seriously, and yet the tragic imperative—the most noble imperative of all—demands that we take everything seriously.

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Tragedy always moves toward its goal (telos) like a convict to his executioner. It does not imply any particular telos, but rather the idea, in general, that one voluntarily adopts a telos, a goal, a limit, from the standpoint of an interior freedom from all teloi, whatever that telos might be. One adopts the telos because one can, not because one has to, because it is better to choose one’s doom than to be chosen by it. Comedy refers precisely to the abstention from such a choice, abstention from the voluntary adoption of a telos; that one reposes on infinity, that one lives in a state of perpetual overflow. Thus, comedy and tragedy are not teloi for man or civilization, they are about teloi, an orientation toward them. Comedy and tragedy are how we relate to teloi. They are “periteloic”.

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Silliness is an activity that takes place beyond the reach of the “why”. So, if from time to time I act in a way that is silly, do not burden me with your “why’s”. My silliness will not be constrained by your telos.

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Silliness (comedy) takes place away from the “why”, tragedy impales itself on it—but both are an implicit rejection of the constraint of the telos. The fatalistic acceptance of tragedy is a confrontation with the telos. It does not content itself with the comedic dismissal of it. It prefers to be crushed by the telos rather than ignore it, and perhaps this is only really indicative of a “serious” psychology on the part of the tragic individual, as Aristotle would have it. The “why” stares us in the face and makes its demands, and for some it is a very easy thing to laugh the madman away, to mock him to scorn, but others, perhaps on some level suffering from the same sickness of which the telos is indicative, must confront it and take it seriously. Maybe this is precisely because they are already “infected” with it, half-believers, and they therefore no longer possess the luxury of remaining indifferent to it.

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The unity of Dionysus in tragedy: The unity of comedy and tragedy, as symbolized by the figure of Dionysus, consists in this—that it is precisely out of the abundance of life (comedy), and not out of need or scarcity, that one seeks out the grand tragic encounter that tears one apart and reduces one to bare essentiality. This bare essentiality, this alchemical quintessence of vital life, is a higher form of abundance. It is the exchange of a quantitative abundance for a qualitative abundance. For the tragedian less is more. For the comedian, more is more.

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The unity of Dionysus in comedy: Comedy is always obliged to laugh. What, for comedy, is the highest source of amusement? The foibles of tragic constraint on the sea of abundance. The tragedian is a sailor in search of land, in the midst of an ocean without a shore—and he has not yet learned the secret of this ocean, the secret enshrined in the mysteries of Comedy, that to drown is the greatest pleasure. Comedy, first and foremost, laughs at tragedy. Comedy dances its most raucous dance of all to the tune of the tragic.

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From the standpoint of tragedy, the comedian is weak. He lacks the will to resist life’s seductions, to force his way to the breaking-point and attain to something beyond “mere life”.

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From the standpoint of comedy, the tragedian is an ignoramus. He does not know the secret of life—that life is founded on endless bliss. Gnosis is the metaphysical mode of comedy.

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If laughter could kill: Humor, particularly that of the ridiculous, the nonsensical, and the absurd, that is, the humor of the carnival, of the Saturnalia, falls under the domain of Dionysus-Shiva (the unity of these two figures is the subject of an interesting book by Alain Daniélou). Humor is a destructive act, but a sort of benign destruction. When subjected to humor, things cease to be what they formerly were—they are destroyed and yet they remain. Viewed from the standpoint of comedy, Shiva’s role as the trans-former (that is, the transcending or divesting of forms) appears under an interesting guise. Rather than the forms falling away, through humor it is the essence of things, or, rather, the essences we supposed to be there but which were in fact illusory, which flee from the forms, and the forms remain behind—only now they are cloud-like, empty of mass, no longer possessing gravity, no longer inspiring fear or respect. And so we laugh.

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The essential kinship of comedy and tragedy can also be shown by way of contrast. They generally appear to us as opposites, but, as already suggested, they cannot be essentially severed from one another—they both belong to the selfsame patron, Dionysus. To see their relationship more clearly one should consider what their “mutual opposite” might be. That is, placing comedy and tragedy on one side, what, then, must occupy the “opposite space”? This would have to be something in the Abrahamic outlook. As Umberto Eco very aptly notes in The Name of the Rose (major spoiler alert), comedy is anathema to the Christian outlook. God demands, above all, to be taken seriously. Christ wept, but he did not laugh. At the same time, tragedy, of which Prometheus is the primordial archetype, is as far from the Abrahamic ethos as could be. A tragic ending is never justified in the Abrahamic outlook—it always requires a theodicy to “explain” it. Death, loss, humiliating defeat, are never profound in themselves. That is, they are never tragic; they are always, for the Abrahamic, a mere mistake, symptomatic of sin (which, in Hebrew, simply means to “miss the mark”, an “error”). What sets comedy and tragedy together on one side, and the morosely self-serious, yet innocently hopeful, Abrahamic view on the other? What criterion divides them? One might say that the Abrahamic radicalizes the same tendencies which are characteristic of tragedy and comedy until they are no longer recognizable. What sets these views, the Greek and the Abrahamic, apart is the notion of moderation.

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For the Greek, a large part of the value of tragedy lies in how, by way of contrast, it sweetens the ordinary, moderate, and regular operations of the world. The cataclysms of tragedy make the everyday that much more precious by comparison. Comedy is valued insofar as it acts as a diversion and joyful overturning of an ordinary world turned tedious. The Abrahamic gives an emphatic “No”, here—not to the cataclysmic and the joyful, but to the moderate with which it is to be contrasted. The Abrahamic says, “if the world is to suffer cataclysm, let every day be cataclysmic. If sin is to have a single day on earth then let it have every day. If life is to have joy, let joy in the Lord be the only meaning of life. The moderate is sinful forgetfulness of the essential”. Through one man sin came to all the world, and through one man all were made free. The only death which is truly justified, the only death which is not a mere error, is the death that abolishes death itself.

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Comedy is the audacious proposition that the good things in life are both limitless and free, that one can have one’s cake and eat it too. Tragedy is the equally audacious proposition that the restricted and contracted is of vaster scope than the expansive and overflowing.

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Dionysus is the primordial patron of tragedy. Prometheus is the primordial subject of tragedy.

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The downfall of Prometheus was a tragedy, but in his ascent he will laugh.