as we have seen, do seem to require deception or false belief on the part of
the audience; others do not. However, it might be possible to argue that
illusion has a more positive role in relation to truth–not merely‘honest’,
as Schiller puts it, but truthful. The philosopher who wrote most exten-
sively about theatre and illusion, Friedrich Nietzsche, came to a version of
this conclusion.
Nietzsche’sfirst book,The Birth of Tragedy, is an account of the origins,
nature and function of Greek (specifically, Attic) tragedy.^63 Following
Schopenhauer, the young Nietzsche held that what we take to be‘the
world’ (people, things, time, space, causation) is itself nothing but an
elaborate illusion created by a single, unified, metaphysical‘will’.^64 For
Schopenhauer, the reality of the will and the unreality of (what we mis-
takenly take to be) the real world of people and things has a number of
devastating consequences. Chief among them is our everyday experience
of desire. We want certain things, and we erroneously think that when
we get these things we will be satisfied. But, since the world just is will
(or desire), all that happens when we get what we want is that we want
something else. Alternatively, if we do not get what we want, we are
unhappy in our frustrated desire. The combination of these two thoughts
is overpowering:first, none of what we think matters is real (our family or
friends, our history or identity, our goals or achievements); second, to
make matters worse, humans are systematically set up to be unhappy, to
be suspended between being bored with what we have and being
unhappy with what we don’t have. Schopenhauer does not advocate sui-
cide as an escape from‘the suffering of the world’, but he clearly takes
some comfort in the thought that the systematic roller-coaster of human
suffering ends with death; certainly, it would be hard to take Scho-
penhauer’s philosophy seriously without coming to the conclusion that
we’re better off dead than alive.^65
Nietzsche’s account of ancient tragedy combines his knowledge of the
Greek world with his interest in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. What Greek
tragedy offered the Greeks, he thought, was an insight into (basically
Schopenhauerian and very unpleasant) truths about the world and the
place of humans within it. On occasion, to be sure, these truths could be
expressed in the form of words uttered during the course of the performance.
The chorus ofOedipusatColonusis able, for example, to express the thought
that the best thing for humans is not to be born at all (followed closely by
dying very young).^66 These basic truths could alsofind expression in ele-
ments of the plot: Oedipus (inOedipus Tyrannus) learns that his apparently
stable, comprehensible and benevolent world is in fact appallingly brutal
and in some sense fated to bring him misery.^67 Nonetheless, the truths
expressed in ancient tragedy are not primarily located in the text and in
the plot–and it has been, Nietzsche thinks, a mistake of the modern
Truth and illusion 67