186 music, philosophy, and modernity
characters are presented as both responsible for their actions and yet
as at the mercy of influences that they do not control, which makes
interpretation of Greek tragedy as a model of the human condition so
complex. Schelling says, for example, that the tragic person – he is refer-
ring to Oedipus – is ‘necessarilyguilty of a crime’ (Schelling 1856 – 61 :
i/ 5 , 695 ).
The debate about tragedy among philosophers until the beginning
of modernity tended to focus on Aristotle’s concept of catharsis. The
‘cleansing’ of feelings supposedly brought about by tragedy is under-
stood as the explanation of why a culture would present images of the
worst things to itself on a public stage. It is easy to relate this idea to
music’s expression of painful or extreme emotions, and early opera was
sometimes regarded in such terms. However, when the relationship of
tragedy to Dionysus comes to the fore during the process of secular-
isation that begins around the middle of the eighteenth century, the
interpretation of tragedy in terms of catharsis is seen as inadequate,
and this both influences approaches to music and is in turn influenced
by music.
The reason why the idea of Dionysus becomes significant once again
can be approached via Merleau-Ponty’s remark that ‘Because percep-
tion gives us faith in a world, in a system of rigorously connected and
continuous natural facts, we believed that this system could incorporate
everything into itself, including the perception which initiated us into
it’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964 : 46 – 7 ). In the structure suggested by Merleau-
Ponty a system based on inferential relations between facts must leave
outside itself what makes possible the establishing of such a system in
the first place. This structure can be related to Kant’s and Schelling’s
separation of the causal world from the ground of human freedom,
which will form the basis of the early Nietzsche’s adoption of Schopen-
hauer for his account of music and tragedy. Something akin to such a
structure offers one way of understanding Greek tragedy and its per-
ceived relationship to music in the nineteenth century.
Greek tragedy explores how systems of order are undermined by a
reality which is resistant to such ordering, hence the link between the
ideas about ‘freedom’ we have examined and the new understandings of
tragedy. Human identities, for example, which are based on inferential
relationships, of the kind in which being a daughter excludes being a
sister of the same person, are undermined when it turns out that it is in
reality possible to inhabit identities which are supposed to be mutually
exclusive within a particular symbolic order. Something similar occurs