This paper, more or less, was an analysis of necessary moral content in works of fiction. It’s boring.
Nietzsche and Plato differed greatly in their opinion of the necessary moral content in works of fiction. Admittedly, this comparison is difficult, if not only for their obvious philosophical differences, but as well for he spatio-temporal realities of art in each of their times; luckily, Nietzsche’s main focus in his aesthetic/philological theory opus “The Birth of Tragedy” works within the corpus of ancient greek dramatic poetry. Owing to the fact that Socrates’ commentaries on art are based on the same subjects (at least in general), the aesthetic theories of moral worth for each are directly comparable.
To begin, the Platonic view of dramatic poetry presented in “The Republic” is not charitable. Poets, even the chief of them—Homer—are taken to be damaging to the fabric of society. This is recognized through the fact that Socrates’ acknowledges the material power of the immaterial ideas and themes of a given work of fiction. His statement that “We must begin by controlling the fable-makers, and admit only the good fables they compose, not the bad” (Poetics p.3) shows his clear belief in the necessity in controlling fictional content. Speaking specifically about the fables concerning the Titans and Olympians: “They are not to be repeated in our city, Adimantus. Nor is it to be said in a young man’s hearing that if he committed the most outrageous crimes, or chastised an erring father by the direst means, he would have done nothing remarkable, but only what the first and greatest of the gods has done.” (Poetics p.4). The motive behind Socrates’ proposed control of fictive content in his proposed city is clear when he states that “Young people can’t distinguish the allegorical from the non-allegorical, and what enters the mind at that age tends to become both indelible and irremovable. Hence the prime need to make sure what they first hear is devised as well as possible for the implanting of virtue” (Poetics p.4). The simple impact to be taken from these passages is that Plato (through his mouthpiece Socrates) believed fully that fiction could have a material effect on human development, and therefore that both moral education and degradation were possible through fiction.
Nietzsche, on the other had, diametrically opposed this distinction—it may be fair to say that he didn’t believe in any mitigating moral instructional value of art. In order to understand Nietzsche’s overall views on ancient Greek drama, one need only look to his Dionysian/Apollonian dichotomy as presented in “The Birth of Tragedy”—all of his following theory is dependent on the distinction. The Dionysian temperament is marked and characterized by the protagonists of ancient drama and the chorus of Satyrs (Birth of Tragedy p.18-21). It is in line with Schopenhauer’s irrational will, and is wanton in that respect. The Apollonian temperament demands beauty and is reflective of the Olympian ethic and the logical intelligibility that the lyric dialogue provided to the work (Birth of Tragedy p. 22-3, 46). The Apollonian is the ordered, intelligible existence opposed and dependent on the hedonistic Dionysian. Together, these temperaments combined to create what Nietzsche believed was the pinnacle of aesthetic achievement: the participatory element of art—specifically ancient Greek drama. This pinnacle was achieved through the effect of the interplay between the temperaments, that is to say that the dual elements lead man to a state where “[he] is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: the artistic power of the whole of nature reveals itself the supreme gratification of the of the primal Oneness amidst the paroxysms of intoxication” (Birth of Tragedy p.18).
Extending his theory on drama and participation, Nietzsche presents his argument regarding the death of ancient Greek drama at the hands of Euripides in section 11 of “Birth of Tragedy” when he singles him out as the most responsible of tragedy’s death. Stating that “[Euripides] brought the audience on to the stage,” Nietzsche thought that the Euripidean practice of narrating the inner lives and emotions of the protagonists was necessarily decadent and damaging to drama (Birth of Tragedy p. 58-9). It abrogated the experience of the sublime that Nietzsche, in heavy reference to Schopenhauer’s thoughts on aesthetic experience, believed resulted from being able to lose one’s self-direction in the face of true beauty. Being that he viewed the Euripidean dramatic mood to be heavily influenced by the rationalization of Socrates and Plato, Nietzsche is set up in clear opposition to Plato.
Whereas the Platonic position held that moral instruction could be possible—and even that the potential for moral instruction in the content of the poem must precede the poem itself—Nietzsche’s worldview would have made correspondence with this rule impossible as a category mistake. For moral instruction to be possible in drama, a baseline condition of objective truth must be recognized. Nietzsche the philologist firmly held that “truths” were simply products of language—further compounded in drama by the fact that Euripidean psychological analysis attempts to use language to convey inner-truths.
Now that the basic definitional beliefs of the Platonic and Nietzschean views have been established—their aesthetic-ethical distinction—“Medea” and “Agamemnon” provide excellent examples on which to apply this supposed divergence with regard to moralizing content. The two works are, themselves, almost avatars of what each temperament purports to provide: true suffering leading to the sublime through the Apollonian/Dionysian with “Agamemnon” and moral psychology leading to greater understanding of the self in “Medea” (of course, “Medea” is regarded as an avatar of the Platonic mood inasmuch as we can set aside Socrates’ admission that he’d ban nearly all forms of poetry in his republic). Whereas the experience of Agamemnon at the hands of Clytemnestra is indisputably linked to the suffering that Nietzsche wants to bring to the forefront of dramatic experience, watching “Medea” would be a contemplative experience, as the audience is being fed an opaque portrait on Medea’s internal motivations. Euripidean drama, at least in regard to Medea, isn’t explicit with it’s motivations and instead asks the audience to, as Nietzsche put it earlier, “come on to the stage” by reacting personally to the piece. With “Agamemnon,” there is little personal reaction to the suffering—rather the repose of the aesthetic sublime—and in “Medea” the audience nearly roots for her (depending on the specific reading and the time in which it is read); this is no accident. The moral and legal authority of Agamemnon makes him difficult to relate with, and his eventual fate of death seems to discount the arguably just thing he did—sacrificing his daughter for the greater good of his men. This would accord nicely with Nietzsche (no matter how “good” you act, truth and justice are impossible), but Socrates would have had a pit in his stomach thinking about youths hearing those messages. On the other hand, the constant inquiry in to Medea’s motivations, the constant imperative on the audience to participate would have shattered Nietzsche’s sublime aesthetic repose, forcing him to consider the worth and prudence of his own actions.
In the end, it may be fair to say that the distinction between Plato and Nietzsche on the subject of moralizing content in art is simple: Plato believed that “the only poetry admissible in our city is hymns to the gods and encomia to good men” (Poetics p.14), whereas Nietzsche believed that our very thoughts, let alone moral conundrums, should be separate because they ruin the intrinsic experience of enjoyment of the play-in-itself.