Theater and philosophy. The dithyramb and the legend

Résumé 0

Theater and philosophy seem to have been born at the same time in ancient Greece, as if by miracle—the Greek miracle. This is why I began by studying a series of eight dialogues from the seventh century B.C., between a master and his slave, which could be considered as a sort of theater before philosophy (although the analysis of it by Jean Bottéro shows that it is not). The historian Louis Gernet prefers to speak of creation rather than of miracle. The question has Nietzschean echoes, who wrote works on the birth of tragedy and the birth of philosophy. His hypothesis immediately presents itself: following his rather artificial attempts to let pre-Socratic philosophies coincide with Greek tragedy, he concludes that true theater, the Dionysian one, has been destroyed by Socratic philosophy: “Socrates destroying the tragedy.” (Greek) philosophy therefore killed (Greek) theater. I then turn to Plato’s reconsideration of the tragedy and poets (which, however, only concerns the Guardians of the Republic). Nietzsche strangely imagines that Plato wanted to compete with theater through his art of dialogue. The question of tragedy gives rise to a long historical and philological detour by way of the work of the great philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff on the attic tragedy (exclusive to Athens), which rejects the Dionysian origins of tragedy. (Just as Jean-Pierre Vernant criticizes Nietzsche’s fatidic opposition between Apollo and Dionysus). Wilamowitz-Moellendorff focuses in great depth on the effective relationships between tragedy and religion, and of the confused question of the dithyramb (supposed to be at the origin of tragedy according to Aristotle), though it continued to exist at the same time as the attic tragedy. Lastly, he considers Aeschylus as the real founder of the tragic as such, and of its essential relationship with legend (and therefore with the epic). I do not elaborate on the following, except to remark that the dialogues written by philosophers do not have the least relationship with what we call theater. Apart from perhaps delving further into the Heideggerian relationship between the ontological difference and the tragic itself, it seems that the question of “theater and philosophy” remains open, or ends in a non liquet.