Possibly the most impressive aspect of Joshua Billings’s book is the scope of its ambition. While previous studies on German idealism’s engagement with tragedy exist—in English, the best known are likely David Farrell Krell’s The Tragic Absolute (Reference Krell2005) and Dennis J. Schmidt’s On German and other Greeks (Reference Schmidt2001)—few if any cast their nets as widely in their survey of the material. Not only does Billings treat key players in idealism—Schelling, the young Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, Hölderlin—but he also includes several figures who fit the idealism label only much more loosely, such as Kant, Schiller, August Schlegel, and Gottfried Hermann. Most importantly, Billings frames the entire topic in the context of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, the seminal seventeenth-century debate in the Académie française concerning the superiority of the ancients or the moderns, which still reverberated in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. This breadth of Billing’s study is constructively counterbalanced by the funnel-like shape of its argument, which moves from the broad background of modern reflections on tragedy in the Querelle, through more specific themes that dominate the idealist appropriation of this topic (freedom, history, theology), to, finally, a detailed account of the tragic in two particular texts: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Hölderlin’s Notes to his translations of Sophocles.
The first of these three parts, ‘Tragic Modernities’, covers chapters one and two. In the first, ‘Quarreling over Tragedy’, Billings begins by tracing the Querelle in France and shows how that debate gradually led to an abandonment of the traditional idea that works from different historical periods can be measured by a universal standard. Instead, the Querelle led to a new conception of each epoch as operating with unique aims and criteria, so that works must be assessed on their cultures’ own terms. The very project of deciding whether the ancients or the moderns are better only made sense under the former presupposition, whereas the latter view increasingly led to a sense of the insuperable otherness of the works of the past. The idea of modernity as a historical epoch radically distinct from the past—the period of the new that moves into a continuously changing future—is intimately tied to this sense of its qualitative difference from the ancients. As Billings shows, the work of articulating this sense of modernity’s uniqueness occurred not least in the attempts during the Querelle to account for the marked divergence between ancient and modern forms of tragedy. Billings takes this argument into the German context in the chapter’s second part, which provides an overview of the reception of Greek literature in the Germanophone world during the early to mid-eighteenth century. The concerns of the Querelle are here tied to questions more particular to the German situation, such as the rise of nationalism, the debate between Gottsched’s Leipzig and Bodmer’s Zurich schools of criticism, and the reception of Shakespeare, as well as the rise of bourgeois tragedy and its privileging of affect.
Chapter Two, ‘The Antiquity of Tragedy’, deepens this account by focusing on two episodes that particularly furthered the view that ancient and modern tragedies are fundamentally distinct phenomena. The first is Guillaume Dubois de Rochefort’s contribution to the Querelle in France, the second Herder’s historicizing theory of literature in Germany. With respect to the latter, Billings focuses on Herder’s well-known comparisons between Shakespeare and Greek drama, but further ties these to an overview of the rise of philology and the explosion of translations and performances of Greek tragedies during this period.
In general terms, these two opening chapters do a great service by providing the proper historical background to studies of modern tragedy, including the perennial question of what distinguishes it from ancient forms and even whether modern tragedy is possible at all (something challenged frequently enough by proponents of the ‘death of tragedy’ thesis, most notable George Steiner in his influential Reference Steiner1961 study by that title). Particularly in English language studies on the topic, the frame of the Querelle and its lasting influence on modern European culture has simply not been sufficiently taken into account, and Billings’s study will hopefully help to change this persistent fault. To readers more familiar with European literature and aesthetics of this period, however, there is little new to be found in these pages, which largely provide a summary of material extensively studied before (as Billings’s own scrupulous footnotes to prior scholarship also make clear).
Something similar might be said about the next section of the book, ‘Tragic Themes’, which covers chapters Three to Five. In the first of these, ‘Revolutionary Freedom’, Billings traces Schiller’s appropriation of Kant’s notion of the sublime to articulate a theory of tragedy distinct from that of Lessing and Mendelssohn. To Schiller, suffering is not an end to creating sympathy or admiration, but rather seeks to exhibit the subject’s freedom. This link of tragedy to freedom, Billing goes on to argue, is taken up by the young Schelling in his Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, which similarly see in tragedy the medium through which freedom can be known within the natural world. But whereas Schiller’s theory of tragedy insists on the experience of the sublime as one of disjunction and rupture, Schelling understands tragedy’s exhibition of freedom as harmonizing and conciliatory, closer to what Schiller ascribes to beauty in the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Billings ends the chapter with an account, first, of August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Lectures on Philosophical Aesthetics, in which, on Billings’ view, many of the themes found in other idealist thinkers are systematized and given concrete application for the first time, and then of the work of the philologist and literary theorist Gottfried Hermann. Although the section dealing with the latter is brief, it provides rewarding reading, as Hermann is by now unlikely to be known to more than a handful of specialists. As Billings shows, Hermann also adheres to the idea that tragedy consists in sublime action arising from the conflict of necessity and freedom, a view that, as with the other figures discussed in this chapter, is born particularly through his reception of ancient tragedies. This means, as Billings does not fail to emphasize throughout, that ancient tragedy became a central vehicle for thinking about political questions during an intensely revolutionary time.
In chapter four, ‘Greek and Modern Tragedy’, Billings takes a closer look at some attempts by idealist thinkers to overcome the gap between ancient and modern tragedy brought about by the Querelle. The first is Friedrich Schlegel’s 1797 On the Study of Greek Poetry, in which Schlegel simultaneously diagnoses the ills of modern art—its decline into the merely interesting—and envisions a renewed aesthetic greatness for the moderns if they manage to properly assimilate the standards of the Greeks, not as slavish imitation but through productive appropriation. In the chapter’s middle section, Billings returns to Schiller in order to map the dramatist’s changing attitudes towards the Greeks, particularly in his late plays, in which Schiller moves away from the notion of tragedy as the manifestation of freedom and towards a view of it as the disclosure of the limits to human autonomy. Billings describes how both the Wallenstein trilogy and Schiller’s Bride of Messina aim for such an effect in part by introducing devices from Greek tragedy, specifically the notion of fate and the figure of the chorus. As in the case of Friedrich Schlegel, these do not reduce to facile imitations, but rather constitute appropriation of the past for modern ends. In the chapter’s last section, Billings discusses Schelling’s Philosophy of Art, which likewise insists on the difference between ancient and modern tragedy to the extent of questioning whether the latter is even possible. As Billings shows, Schelling is ultimately able to answer this question in the affirmative when he comes across the works of the Spanish dramatist Calderón de la Barca (only recently translated into German by August Schlegel), whose catholic sensibility, in his view, is able to achieve the unity between necessity and freedom, universal and particular that tragedy requires.
Chapter Five, ‘Tragic Theologies’, begins to narrow the study’s focus by examining just two authors, Hegel and Hölderlin, who also occupy the last part of the book. The central thrust of this chapter is that Hegel and Hölderlin’s discussions of tragedy must be understood in relation to their theological concerns. More specifically, Billings shows that both figures see tragedy not simply as a phenomenon in history, but as a historical force in its own right. And further still, for both Hegel and Hölderlin, tragedy plays an epistemic function by laying bare the order that underlies the apparent chaos of history, since in tragedy conflict only ever constitutes a stage in a teleological process. With respect to Hegel, these ideas are examined through his engagement with tragedy and antiquity in three instances. First, Billing discusses the contrast in ‘The Spirit of Christianity’ between Judaism as a flawed tragedy that fails to achieve reconciliation and a utopian Christianity in which such reconciliation is obtained. The latter position, to Billings, effectively reads Sophocles’s play Oedipus at Colonus in Christological terms. The second instance of Hegel’s early engagement with tragedy comes in his comments on Schiller’s Wallenstein, which he views, as he did Judaism, in opposition to proper Greek tragedy because it is stuck in a despair that fails to achieve reconciliation. Finally, in Hegel’s essay on Natural Law, which is the subject of one of the book’s most detailed and interesting discussions, the formation of the modern ethical state is itself seen as a tragic history in which sacrifice is necessary for the sake of progress, an idea that Hegel again develops with recourse to texts and concepts from classical drama.
The third and final part of Genealogy of the Tragic, ‘Tragic Texts’, is without doubt the most incisive, primarily because its attention to just two works provides Billings with the opportunity for closer analysis and argument than does the summary of a broader range of material in the preceding chapters. In chapter Six, ‘Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Fate of Tragedy’, Billings argues that Hegel moves away from the view of history as an unending tragic process dominant in the essay on Natural Law, to a new understanding in which tragedy is more strictly confined to the specific moment of Greek antiquity: ‘the dilemmas of tragedy are seen as meaningful only for a particular moment in time, demonstrating a transient stage of individual and social development’ (166). This is substantiated through two places in the Phenomenology, the chapter ‘Spirit’, which deals with tragic conflict in its ethical dimension, and the ‘Religion’ chapter, in which Hegel analyzes the theological and aesthetic sides of tragedy. In the former instance, Hegel presents Sophocles’s Antigone as an example of the immediate relation to communal ethical norms that constitutes Greek life. Under such immediacy, individuals must commit to laws absolutely, which excludes the possibility of abiding by multiple sets of rules and therefore leads to tragic conflict when situations emerge in which more than one law is called for—both the human and the divine. This conflict nevertheless leads to reconciliation when it becomes clear that the opposing ethical laws share a common substance. Billings points out that Hegel makes this case in relation to Antigone by way of two mistranslations of Sophocles’s text. In the first instance, he changes a line so as to have Antigone assert that her suffering is proof of her own error (rather than, as in Sophocles, merely expressing uncertainty about her justification), and in the second, he has the heroine recognize her identity with her opponent in virtue of their common injury (where Sophocles merely has Antigone express her desire for retribution).
In his analysis of the ‘Religion’ chapter of the Phenomenology, Billings examines Hegel’s discussion of Greek life as the second major form of religious community, in which the divine is understood and represented in human terms. Drama here serves as the exhibition of gods insofar as its heroes are the direct embodiment of divine principles. Again, however, the heroes and heroines of Greek drama can only have knowledge of one aspect of the divine, and as such always remain ignorant of the whole substance of which they form a part. This tension between knowledge and ignorance leads to conflicts between different instances of divine law, which must be resolved in terms that Billings shows are closely tied to the Aristotelian features of tragic plot: peripateia, anagnorisis and pathos. The insight into the underlying identity of different divine obligations, however, also spells the end of Greek religion, since it renders the pantheon of distinct gods obsolete. In spite of this, tragedy retains contemporary relevance in the Hegelian schema, Billings shows, to the extent that it preserves the memory of the form of life that it embodies. In that way, tragedy for Hegel serves as a vehicle for spirit to become conscious of itself and of the trajectory through which it has passed.
In the final chapter, ‘Hölderlin’s Sophocles: Tragedy and Paradox’, Billings treats Hölderlin’s enigmatic Notes to his translations of Sophocles. The chapter picks up on Billings’s earlier analysis of Hölderlin’s play The Death of Empedocles in chapter five, and argues that it is Hölderlin’s sense of the failure of that project’s attempt to provide a modern tragedy that leads him to articulate a new understanding of the nature and value of Greek drama. Billings’s analysis of these texts is notable for its insistence on their argumentative coherence and his close attention—more marked here than anywhere else in the book—to the actual philological work that Hölderlin performs. The key to Holderlin’s conception of tragedy is that the genre consists in the transition from an unstable identity between gods and humans (triggered by a theological over-interpretation by the latter that has them claim divine authority—Oedipus’s interpretation of the oracle, Antigone’s insistence on her burial rights), to a reassertion of the hierarchical difference between the two domains that leads to renewed stability.
Much more would need to be said to do justice to the wealth of material in Billings’s work, especially the rich concluding chapter and its fascinating account of Hölderlin’s conception of translation as itself a tragic process. Unquestionably, future studies of German idealism’s engagement with tragedy and the tragic will need to take account of this book, as anyone working on tragedy in either its ancient or modern forms will not want to ignore it. Nevertheless, one can finish Genealogy of the Tragic wishing that the author had pushed his argument further in at least two specific directions. On the one hand, it is notable that the discussion—possibly because of the very scope of its ambition—tends to shy away from more detailed and technical analysis of the philosophical arguments put forward by German idealism. To be fair, Billings begins his study announcing that he is interested in German idealism primarily for the movement’s engagement with history (5). But this approach appears to come at the cost of a deeper understanding of notions no less—if not more—central to idealism’s approach to tragedy, most notably the idea of the absolute. Although Billings’s account frequently invokes the ideas of harmony and reconciliation that presuppose that notion, the absolute is only occasionally dealt with directly and then in terms that remain fairly descriptive and vague (e.g., ‘The absolute is a state of pure identity in which there is no consciousness or differentiation, and therefore no division between phenomenon and noumenon’(85)). In the absence of a more thorough presentation of the metaphysics underlying idealism’s understanding of tragedy, the key characteristics of unity in tension that Billings draws out are difficult to distinguish from organicist notions of art more broadly (which unquestionably owe much to idealist aesthetics). What Billings says of Hegel and Hölderlin’s early understanding of art thus seems applicable to much of his own account of idealism, namely that it considers ‘aesthetics … quite abstractly, as a realm of synthesis and wholeness’ (139).
Second, it is notable that Billings, who is a classicist by training, does not do much to bring his philological knowledge to bear on his chosen topic. With the possible exception of the chapter on Hölderlin, there is little in this book that could not have been written by someone limited to second-hand knowledge of ancient Greek. Even in the chapter on Hölderlin, Billings is tracing ground that has been examined at greater depth before, as he acknowledges (199–200, n. 25). This is a shame, since unquestionably Billings is uniquely positioned to do what few now can, namely describe not only what the Germans thought about the ancient Greeks, but what transformations that thought brought to its material. An account of German idealism’s reception of Greek tragedy that could measure their relation with these philosophical and philological questions more clearly in view would promise intellectual rewards of the deepest kind. For all its merits, Billings’s book is not where that encounter can be found.
