Marx & The Greek Wound

A Prolegomenon To Probing Modernity's Shadow

I circled myself till I met myself coming back.

— Sophocles

Death itself is pre-formed in living; it must therefore be understood as a specific form of life.

— Karl Marx

Art is dead! Long live art!

— Mikhail Lifshitz

In his Poetica, Aristotle characterizes poetry as having a greater philosophical import than historical writing, since the former deals with the universal, and the latter the particular. Poetry, says Aristotle, is the expression of what could be, whereas history is the simple recapitulation of what has already been. However the fundamental feature of modern philosophy is, arguably, that it is forced to respond to its temporal situation. In fact, its very existence has hinged on whether or not it can respond to it. Philosophy is always responding to its own history, and in modernity this response becomes a response to history as such. The ironic twist then is that history, in becoming the problem for philosophy, is not only the means to identify in concrete terms what could be, but for some raises the very question of being as such. What's more ironic is that the basic intellectual, cultural, and political gestures which have contributed to this reversal almost always carry an explicit self-relation to classical antiquity; in the artistic and philosophical rediscovery of the Renaissance; the classical educations of Protestant reformers; the revivification of the dramatic form in Shakespeare, himself well-versed in the Greek language; the neoclassical turn of the American and French revolutions; the inestimable significance of the Greeks and Romans for German idealist philosophy and romanticism; the classicism of Locke, Smith, Rousseau, Gibbon, Jefferson, to name a few, whose influence in philosophy, political economy, historiography, remains steadfast; not to mention the notorious and profoundly important contributions of Freud. Nor is it any coincidence that the two greatest prophets of the crisis of modernity, and thereby the most infamous—Marx and Nietzsche—had the strongest possible grasp on the Greek and Latin languages; that Marx (whom Edmund Wilson called the Poet of Commodities), like Plato, began in his youth as a poet, only to reject the endeavor entirely upon philosophical initiation; that Nietzsche’s titanic sounding of the alarm on everything human past, present and future found its expression in a literary-poetic register which even in translation remains unparalleled.

In a certain sense, the period of the emergence of bourgeois society can be distinguished from the middle ages in its retrieval of antiquity, its need to be measured and assessed in light of this distant world, which it has claimed as its inheritance, and which the medieval world had all but forgotten, save for the cloistered safeguarding of select works of Aristotle in the Scholastic period. It is exactly this renewed relation which Marx had identified as a symptom, and therefore as an object of critique. A distinguishing contradictory feature of our epoch is society’s consistent generation of utopian images which stand opposed to it. The Left has all but lost any theoretical ability to clarify these images to itself, finding the mere fact of utopian generation as the only requisite for social change, the result of which is a pantheon of golden calves and an awkward conservatism surrounding them. Yet it points to the reality of the poeticization of history as a necessary aspect of capitalism. This poeticization of history, indeed history itself is something to be overcome. The abstract ideal of historical utopia has a real potential of becoming concrete. Its opaque classical connection suggests a further question to be deduced: what can this historico-poetic twist tell us about Greek poetry itself as a historical form? Or, what does this poetry, in our relation to it, tell us about history?

Here we arrive at the fundamental political importance of Greek tragedy, the meaning of which will, hopefully, unfold throughout the remainder of this paper. Athens is significant not because it was the first democracy, but because it was the first democracy that failed. In truth, its fragility was present from the beginning, and it is perhaps because of its fragility that it was hailed as a singular achievement. The classical era is then, much more than a simple period of flourishing, an era in which its very own emergence had to in some way be understood at the level of cultural expression. The Homeric principle of fate had become deeply problematic. Aristotle said that man is born to be a citizen. Yet if we are to be virtuous, ethical, moral—if we are to be citizens, what does that mean about our agency? In other words, if we willingly subject ourselves to a law, whence does the goodness and the inherent freedom within subjecting ourselves to that law come from? The problem is then whether or not it is possible to reconcile the natural order with the social order. In bourgeois society this tension reaches its full dialectical pitch through Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. This is why there is something eerily modern about an Aristotle or a Thucydides. This tension is at the foundation of Plato’s Republic but becomes the definitive structural feature of Aristotle’s entire philosophy. Everywhere in Aristotle one can find a profound sensitivity for mediation e.g. hylomorphism; the relation of potential and actuality; the ethical relation between the universal and the particular. The unique artistic form which corresponds to this philosophical need, the development of which was perhaps possible only in this political context, is Greek drama. To highlight its own specific registration of the contradictions, which in fact differs quite significantly from the philosophic, this paper aims at a somewhat unorthodox reading of its most essential characters.

In a slightly mysterious passage appearing at the end of the first notebook of the Grundrisse, which was never meant for publication, Marx quickly jotted down a few notes on topics which he had the intention of returning to. They read like a spontaneous burst of initial thoughts which do not want to be forgotten and for this reason are rather ambiguous and aporetic. The only subject he elaborates on to any extent, and in a couple paragraphs at that, is the development of art and its relation to material production, using the Greeks as the example par excellence (which we will see is not at all a matter of fitting the problem into the crude base-superstructure causal schema of vulgar Marxism).

Before reproducing these remarks it should be clarified that they only come after an extensive explanation of the significance of bourgeois society for determining the meaning of all previous history, just as “human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape.” In other words, it is not that the whole of hitherto existing history is the history of class struggles, per se, as the oft misunderstood polemical remark by Marx and Engels goes, but rather that only from the perspective of having to work through the contradiction of capitalism itself does history appear thus. The meaning, or potential lack thereof, then, of the Greeks, of human history as a whole, is an open question; outside of the facts which constitute it, the past is yet to be determined, as is the present, and the future existence or nonexistence of the human species. The point for Marx is not so much to find a hidden meaning and logic of developmental necessity in history as much as it is to make history meaningful, to make the past necessary through the immanent conditions of the present—that is the task which capitalism points to.

This aside is meant to set the stage for Marx’s, but also Nietzsche’s and Hegel’s views on the Greeks, which will here be explored in however preliminary a way it may or may not be due to constraints on time and length. Ultimately, the question to be asked is what the Greeks mean, not in themselves, in their particular historical context, but rather what it is that they mean for us, as a people who are, for better or worse, always looking towards them. This is exactly the problem which Marx identifies:

…the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model. A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naïvité, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm?

There are three crucial points to keep in mind here. First, the Greeks are the childhood of humanity—there is something emphatically universal in them. Although one should be on guard against any romantic readings. This latent universality is there to be unfolded through a critique of our necessary projection from the standpoint of bourgeois society, which is universal in outlook, and which therefore unwittingly sees in the Greeks something more Greek than the Greeks themselves; something futural in the ancient past. In other words, the Greeks only became “the Greeks” with bourgeois society—not so much because of who the Greeks were, but because of what bourgeois society is and is not, and what it is still yet to become. Perhaps also the Greeks themselves still have not fully become “the Greeks.” Secondly, since it is the meaning of the Greeks for us which we are trying to apprehend, the fact that they represent our childhood should be taken with its full Freudian implications. Namely, the classical ideal is not something to be returned to, lamented over, or reproduced in the standard sense of the word; it exists as a symptom. More directly, as a wound. However gangrenous and neglected it may have become in recent years, it is nonetheless a wound which modernity has, right up to the present day, felt an incessant need to pick at; even the so-called “post-moderns,” who are anything but this, consistently reopen it, and in so doing, reopen the problem of modernity. This projection must be understood and overcome for the sake of salvaging the universal dimension from its unconscious abstraction. Thirdly, this question of reproduction in a higher form, a sublation of the original, opens up an artistic, and therefore also a political horizon. It is political precisely because such a reproduction is entirely unimaginable and indeed truly impossible within the strictures of current social forms. In the general proletarianization of society, aesthetic sensibility in the individual is necessarily stupefied and destroyed due to social, creative activity being reduced to a mere thing surrendered in exchange for the signification of what is given up (i.e. wages). This results in an increasingly contemplative state which is more depressing, demanding, and demoralizing than labor itself and which does not look for artistic edification, but anesthetizing entertainment and the passive expenditure of what little remains of waking life outside of work. The contemporary evidence of this is easily found in the total jeopardization of the aesthetic faculty of attention and the active engagement therein.

Our projective relation to Greek art thus reveals itself as three-sided, the aspects of which remain crucial for a more general emancipatory outlook. The universal indicates the nature of the historical and political task yet to be achieved, the phenomenon of the wound implicates the necessity of this universality, since it must define itself as the consummation of its own historical “childhood,” and the prospect of reproduction points to the existential necessity of the complete aesthetic rejuvenation of the human, and its possibility in the transcendence of capital. This rejuvenation would at one and the same time be the conscious apprehension of all of the previous aspirations in the whole heritage of humanity’s creative activity. Just as Engels said that German classical philosophy was the inheritance of the working class, we will add that Greek culture is also its inheritance, since it is only through socialism that a parallel cultural achievement on a higher level can be produced. This view is original to Marxism. The final goal then, is to see how the modern relation to the classical world points to something beyond the capitalist horizon, from the point of view of aesthetic revitalization. Aside from the Greeks themselves, thinkers whose thoughts on the Greeks have been most influential in our perception of them—Hegel and Nietzsche stand to be examined. In the end, a new tragic character will emerge from the old. It must be remembered that this is done, not from the view and for the sake of philosophy, but from the view and for the sake of art and the historico-poetic implications found in the original form of drama.

For Hegel, the “subjective beginning” of Greek art is in the “boundless impulse of individuals to display themselves, and to find enjoyment in so doing.” This character of individuality conditioned by Beauty has its basis in the rupturing of the unity between the individual and nature, in the need to transform the natural into the spiritual–in the need to humanize the world and for Spirit to see itself in something outside itself. This is traceable back to the origins of the gods themselves and their overthrow of the Titans, which is the wresting of sovereignty away from the pure and brute principles of nature. They still retain determinate relations to these principles, albeit in a Spiritual, that is a human, way. Proceeding from Helios, the sun, in Apollo light becomes the light of self-consciousness, of reason, of truth. He is the purifying god, the rays of whom are represented by arrows. It is no longer the general fertility of Gaia which is worshipped, but the fertility of humans and the relations therein with Hera and Demeter. Zeus, as the holder of the highest natural forces of the sky is thereby also a deeply political god. In a fascinating speculation, Hegel also attributes the association of the Muses with water nymphs as having its origin in a creative attention to the sounds of trickling water in rivers and streams. This spiritual interpretation of nature which was the origin of μαντεία, oracular divination, and which is also the basis for poetry, is the opposite of superstition since it is explanatory. Μαντεία is the unfolding of meaning not out of nature, but out of Spirit projected into nature. This is also the reason why the theogony, and indeed almost the entire imaginative foundation of Greek culture, comes directly from poetry. Even Herodotus, Hegel points out, says as much.

Thus, in the Beautiful Individuality we find the need to reflexively display one’s self as the need to be displayed, not simply in nature, but in the gods of nature themselves, an adequate manifestation of whom is found only in art. Human life as a whole then becomes a work of art, since the gods depend on it being so. Sculpture becomes no longer the realization of a mathematical ideal, but the representation of the full potential of the human, and therefore the divine, form. The athlete, the hero who dies in the full vigor of youth, is the living embodiment of this potential. The origin of such art, for Hegel, is in an ancient freedom. Such freedom lies in the concrete individualization of the gods through artistic form, something not possible in religious relations where divinity, or government, are despotic. Only in the free social life of the polis can an art which has the human as its aim emerge. In some earlier marginal notes from 1842, Marx likewise expresses an affinity for the Greeks, no doubt influenced by Hegel, for the same reason, noting that the gods are only differentiated from simple pulsations of nature through their artistic form, and because such artistry manifests “beautiful human mores in a splendid, integrated form.” The gods do not make art possible, art makes the gods possible. The material basis within which both are grounded and interdependent is the free associative sphere of the polis, Athens, of course, in particular.

Hegel’s own interpretation of the origin of tragedy out of these circumstances, interesting in its own right, is perhaps more interesting because it shows that Nietzsche was in fact not the one to first conceive tragedy as a unity of the Apollonian and Dionysian. To be sure, Hegel does not explicitly describe it in these terms, and Nietzsche’s account is original to himself. Nor does it seem likely that Nietzsche had any extensive engagement with Hegel’s reading, that is, if he even read it at all. Nietzsche associates the Apollonian principle with that of individuation whereas the Dionysian is the annihilation of individuality. These two artistic currents develop in poetry and music respectively. We have already seen Hegel’s view on beautiful individuality, but he likewise recognizes the Bacchic as a frenzied loss of one’s self. The beautiful individual finds its expression in the complete corporeality of the athlete, in the statue of the hero, or in the latter’s linguistic universalization through poetry. Yet, for Hegel, the external, Apollonian character of poetry betrays its own inner dimension. As Nietzsche notes, poetry, far from being the imaginative construction of the poet arising over and independently of the world, seeks to be the exact opposite of this, namely, the unadulterated truth lying at the very heart of nature. Poetry therefore must work to discard the poet himself. The ultimate barrier to poetry’s fullest expression is in the poet. The independence from imagism and conceptualization which poetry strives for is already in full play in music, which in itself relies on neither. Poetry is then an imitation of music; to go further it must annihilate the beautiful individual, as already in music and dance one is beside one’s self. It is precisely this which is achieved in tragedy: the subject of poetry, embodied on stage, is destroyed in the midst of the chorus, and it is for this reason that the negation of the hero in tragedy is pleasurable. In whom is the highest consummation of this mysterious union found, according to Nietzsche? Cassandra and Antigone. Why?

It is in the attempt to answer this question that our investigation comes full circle. The brief summation of Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s views and their relation was proffered for the sake of a quick distillation of what are perhaps the most developed bourgeois relations to the Greeks one can find in critical philosophy. From the outset was emphasized a relation between the historical, the poetic, the aesthetic in general, and their strange convergence in the classicism definitive of the modern epoch. The persistent value of the Greeks, the perfection of their artistry, is inseparable from the historical process, and an elucidation of their integration within it can hardly be started here. The sole aspect of this process with which we are concerned at present is the possibility of a rebirth—a new renaissance. As bourgeois society was inaugurated by the Renaissance, so too a higher mode of production would have its own higher form of artistic production. In this regard, what does the significance of Aeschylus for Marx, the importance of Antigone for both Nietzsche and Hegel indicate?

It is rather simple to identify the Dionysian and Apollonian in Cassandra and Antigone, and yet are they not both united in an embrace of death? What is the nature of this embrace?

The inextricable link for the Greeks between humanity and the gods which has already been noted implies also, as in analogous mythologies such as that of the Norse, an ontological non-priority of the gods, meaning they do not pre-exist the cosmos but only emerge out of it. Of course, this is evident in Hesiod and the myth of Titanomachy. It is perhaps precisely because of this reason, that the gods are fashioned in the image of man that something even higher than them can be ascertained. Hegel certainly thinks so, citing the Greek freedom in this regard as both the source of their artistic genius and their cultural downfall. Isn’t the essence of tragedy to bring forth characters entirely aware of this?

The significance of Antigone as a play is its complete absence of the gods in any form. They are nowhere to be found. There is but one warning from Teiresias, and no other oracular events. One can and should imagine the entire play without any religious quality. This is already the standard reading anyway, since Antigone is supposedly acting out of devotion to her brother and familial duty. In other words, it is not a duty to the gods, but of love, and she says as much (line 525). Ismene calls it a love for the impossible (90). Antigone herself acknowledges the impossibility of her own devotion when she admits its total self-referentiality—it is a principle which has existed for all time, the origin of which cannot be ascertained. A commitment to love is also the source of Haemon’s suicide. We should not have to dwell on the point of the importance of mortality for a true instantiation of love. Love is perhaps the only human affect which is next to impossible to find in the stories of the gods, because they do not, and cannot have an obligation to it in the same way as humans. It is for this reason that in acknowledging love, Antigone already sees herself as totally dead to the world (560). Yet it is still far from being love in any traditional sense of the word, even of philia. The prime characteristic of Antigone’s devotion is dissatisfaction, the impossibility of ever being fulfilled; a radical negation of everything as it exists. The Antigonean principle is therefore the anti-principle—the principle above principles, which is in truth the most human principle, since it has no need for any transcendental adjudication but is entirely self-determined. Antigone is a law unto herself.

The counterpart of the anti-principle is the character who, totally abandoned by the gods, recognizes the absolute failure of any transcendental instantiation, it's one-sidedness, its hypocrisy, the injustice of Justice—Cassandra. Cassandra's suffering is not simply in knowing her fate, but in knowing that it will amount to nothing, that she is totally without redemption, hence her peculiar invocation of the sun immediately before her death, a reversion to Titanic Nature. Aeschylus immediately supplements her death in the choral claim that death is softer than tyranny. There is a curious freedom in abandonment, in being totally let go into the amoral, indifferent multiplicity of nature, as embodied by the Dionysian. The Apollonian and the Dionysian are two sides of freedom, impeccably united in the figure of Prometheus.

The gods depend on artistry, and in Aeschylus’ Prometheus, the artist attains a self-consciousness of its own act. That is to say, it finds the ability to totally dispense with gods and to take for itself that which it previously only attributed to them but which is instead found in active culture—the inexhaustible capacity to create for which every aspect of human sensuousness attests to. As Marx puts it, “seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, observing, feeling, desiring, acting, loving…all organs…are in their objective action…the appropriation of [a] human reality.” Thus suffering itself, suffering humanly, as in tragedy, is pleasurable, since it is “not only through thought, but through all the senses that man is affirmed in the objective world.” Life becomes absolutely redeemed on its own terms. As Nietzsche says, the Aeshcylean demand for justice reaches its highest point in Prometheus, for the dignity he confers onto sacrilege, onto humanity’s own self becoming through the trials of fire and active, objective expression.

Thus in taking Cassandra, Antigone, Prometheus as a unified whole, we stumble upon the greatest gift of Ancient Greek culture, which is the source of its persistent prescience. For the first time, an entire cultural form bursts forth which not only acknowledges its own historical transience, the volatility of its own life, its own art, its own rulers, its own customs, its own polities, its own religion, its own gods—that it recognizes all of this, not as a lamentation, but as an affirmation which justifies the millennia of its birth, life, and decay–from the murky primeval origins of its heroic age through to its tragicomic end–this, above everything, is what they have left us. We share this fate, although in a way unimaginable even to them. That is, the historico-political horizon which capitalism points to, should we decide to remember it, is the possibility of consciously taking up this task of affirmation, but in an unprecedented scale of self-negation, self-overcoming and negative self-transcendence. From our perspective the whole of history has led to the necessity of this task–that humanity either take its history wholly into itself, for itself or allow it to be the thing which drives it into annihilation. In a world which dominates itself, it is history which threatens.

We should therefore resist at all costs the overdone and moderate critical trope which has to see hubris as the end all to everything tragic. Against it, the Promethean-Antigonean principle should always be asserted which gives, in opposition to the hubristic caution of "Nothing in excess!" the emphatic declaration that "In spite of everything, everything is to be pushed forward." Life’s full excess triumphs over its own self-imposed limitation. We look back at the Greeks because we feel it is impossible to outdo them. Yet this fatal view itself only accounts for such an impossibility in the world as it exists now, and resigns itself to it. The true artistic task is therefore revolutionary. The goal is not to repeat, but to overcome the Greeks. One must imagine that the Greeks want to be outdone. The reproduction of the childhood of humanity is the production of a new humanity on which the continued existence of art depends. The Promethean banner is of aesthetic emancipation. The emancipation of the senses, each of which will become “theoreticians in practice.” As with the tragic unity, the fullest realization of the human is the fullest realization of the nature into which it is extinguished and out of which it emerges. The extent to which nature is upheld as something totally separate from humanity and human society is the extent to which current reified consciousness makes it impossible to see anything human as natural and anything natural as something human. Neither nature nor the human have yet to truly emerge, since to see the world as it is in its inherent wonder and infinitude is to see the world through the freedom of all senses, in the eyes which see through all other eyes, in the hands which reach out and feel themselves in communion with heaven and earth, and in the consciousness which knows itself to be in this relation, which finds all its suffering and joys in the suffering and joy of all life, and in so doing, creates.