• IBSEN COURSE •
Course Syllabus
Required Reading
Week I Material
Week II Material
Week III Material
Week IV Material
Week V Material
Week VI Material
Week VII Material
Week VIII Material
Week IX Material
Week X Material
Week XI Material
Week XII Material
Week XIII Material

Romanticism to Realism
an online course by Brian Johnston

WEEK VI: Dialectics and Drama

    Dialectical thinking emerges when a people believes that human, not divine, activity shapes human history.  “Man is the measure of all things” said the ancient Greek philosopher, Protagoras.   Dialectical drama emerged in the first democracy, when Athens set out to remake itself in its own idealized image.  A trilogy like Aeschylus’s The Oresteia assumes the human world has evolved through human actions in Time (History).  Zeus may be in the background working through human agents and their passions, but it is these agents and their actions that bring about a new order of human life; and the trilogy ends with the warning that civilization, if not watchful, could always suffer recidivism to savagery by human action.This evolutionary concept of history is possible only if history is seen as man-made, not the immutable product of God. 

     Beginning with the Enlightenment thinkers proclaimed human civilization is not free.   It is the result of historical-cultural influences over which we have no control.Through centuries we have been indoctrinated, intimidated, reined in by laws that reflect only power interests and not human fulfillment.   To work one’s way to mental/spiritual freedom we need to identify the falsities, deceits and contradiction both in our world and in our own consciousnesses.  An Ibsen play is an action exposing what is false behind the appearance of truth, and what is false in one’s own identity and its beliefs: the contradictions in the world one inhabits and in oneself preventing self-determination, freedom. 

     These impediments to freedom often are even what we believe to be our virtues, our deeply held but unanalyzed convictions and values.  Disorder, conflict, are to be welcomed as the condition of winning one’s way to truth and freedom.  The true condition of the human spirit is not peace, quietude, but an incessantly restless, critical activity of mind.. Dialectic is the movement of human consciousness as it engages with reality and its contradictions and seeks to overcome them. It is initiated by a moment of ‘awakening’- what in Greek drama is called the ‘anagnorisis’ (seeing) usually accompanied by a ‘peripety’ (reversal of situation)

A WORD  ON DIALECTICS

       The dialectical method is critical dialogue — that is, critical discussion.   Greek tragedy is dialectical.  The Greek myths employed by the dramatists have the nature of hypotheses, to be tested, changed, even discarded (especially by Euripides).  The scientific spirit is seen in the dramatists' way of independently using Myth. A Myth is a revelation of the real. It seeks to be in agreement with given reality though it goes speculatively beyond to suggest universal meanings, or lessons, from the myth.  Greek drama sought to make the mythic tradition relevant to the new conditions of the polis and by doing so, found it necessary to interpret and adapt the myths to satisfy the skeptical spirit of the Athenian democracy. The Greek dramatists 'corrected' and even contradicted each other's interpretation of the myth and competed to represent it adequately to the polis.  Greek drama became a mutual interrogation between the poets and public of the democratic polis and the old, aristocratic and mythic past.  Each dimension, the traditional past and the innovative present, questions the sufficiency of the other. By this dialecticial interrogation, the procedure of the dramatist resembles that of a scientist or a philosopher.  This dialectic between the cultural past and the present is recovered fot drama with the Romantic movement and will be the major theme of Ibsen's drama.

   In dialectic, the detected inadequacy of a concept (thesis) provokes a counter-concept (“anti-thesis). The counter-concept qualifies or refutes the thesis-concept  and from tnis collison emerges a new clonceptpreserving what survives as true in the first concept to arrive at a “synthetic” new truth which, however, now is itself a new thesis begetting a new anti-thesis in order to associate itself with it by negating it —in turn  in a new synthesis, ad infinitum.   (The pattern of thesis-antithesis-synthesis is a simplification of the dialectic process).  Hegel, like Aeschylus, insists that history moves with a dialectical motion.  He describes the gradual processes anticipating the sudden emergence of revolutionary change:

…it is not difficult to see that our epoch is a birth-time, and a period of
transition.  The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things hitherto
prevailing, and with the old ways of thinking, and is in the mind to let them
all sink into the depths of the past and to set about its own transformation.  It
is indeed never at rest, but carried along with the stream of progress ever onward.
But it is here as in the case of the birth of a child; after a long period of nutrition in silence,
the continuity of the gradual growth in size, of quantitative change,
is suddenly cut short by the first breath drawn – there is a break in the process,
a qualitative change – and the child is born. 

In like manner the spirit of the time, growing slowly and quietly ripe
for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates one fragment after another of the
structure of its previous world.  That it is tottering t its fall is indicated only
by symptoms here and there.  Frivolity and again ennui, which are spreading
in the established order of things, the undefined foreboding of something unknown – all these betoken that there is something else approaching.  This gradual crumbling to pieces,
which did not alter the general look and aspect of the whole, is interrupted by the sunrise,
which, in a flash and at a single stroke, brings to view the form and structure of the new world.

   In this famous passage Hegel claims dialectic is the concealed way of the world itself – a movement cunningly at work beneath the surface: and this is a good way of looking at an Ibsen play in which the material reality of the ‘story’ the play tells is being worked upon, subverted and undermined from the beginning by the plot (which is the dialectic) which has been at work even before the action of the play commences.

    Greek drama, like Greek philosophy, is dialectical and derives from the basically humanist idea that “Man is the measure of all things.”  Our human world (society; institutions, beliefs, historical memory, ideas of right and wrong, etc.) are the result of human consciousness at work on human reality, distorting it and being distorted by it in turn.    While it is a record of human achievements, discoveries, etc,. it also is a record of injustices, errors, indoctrinations that have created the conflict-filled reality we find ourselves living in. 

     In Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, the trilogy begins (thesis) in a culture of vendetta violence, crimes and suffering (the Agamemnon) but this impossibly savage condition creates the desire for something new, a better human order, (antithesis) which begins to emerge in a new kind of hero (humanity) – Orestes in The Libation Bearers.   However, this situation also has its deep contradictions (Orestes, obeying a god, Apollo, avenges his father but kills his mother and offends the Erinyes)  So the trilogy must evolve a new kind of human concept of civilization and Justice: and the third play shoes the birth of human democracy, where Justice is a new, communal responsibility.  Reality, in this trilogy, is evolving, and chaos and even crimes are the necessaary stages of this evolution to civilization.  Laws are the result of crimes.  Without crimes, not laws would come into being: they are made from unhappy human experience, not from directives from God. 

     The drama of a Christian culture like the Elizabethan, resists dialectical thinking.  The idea that we, as humans, have made and can remake the world for better or worse, discovering (analyzing) its contradictions made by our own consciousness through time (History) and overcoming them through the exercise of our freedom of will and reason, would be blasphemous  - the world is made by a God for a purpose (an agenda) which we human must try to fathom and fulfill.  From this worldview, any radical change we brought to our human condition would be against the divine agenda.  In e.g. the Shakespeareans master plot, change is a violation, a disturbance of Order.  A tragic action, for instance, would show a human world thrown into woeful disorder, creating chaos and suffering, but, ideally, ultimately restored to the lost Order.  Disorder usually is aberrant, caused by a ‘villain’ whose cunning and ambition causes the ‘good’ characters to suffer.  By his actions, the villain brings on a disorder, chaos that will overwhelm him/her, too.

     In Romantic and post-Romantic drama, the world has evolved through human actions in Time (History) into a complex structure of achievements and injustices; of knowledge and errors; of advances in knowledge and of recidividisms; of valuable traditions but also of oppressive systems and institutions.  Humans have been indoctrinated, intimidated, reined in by laws that reflect only power interests and not Justice.  We are not the free agents we aspire to be; at birth we enter into historical-cultural influences over which we have no control and which negate our potential free humanity.  To work one’s way to mental/spiritual freedom we need to 'negate the negatrion'; - identify the falsehoods, deceits and contradictions in our world and in our own consciousnesses.  "The known," wrote Hegel, "just because it is the known, is the unknown". The inherited impediments to freedom often are what we believe to be our virtues, our deeply held, but unanalyzed, values.  We saw them eloquently articulated by Edmund Burke and uncompromisingly attacked by Tom Paine in the opening dialogue of this course.  They can be found everyday in our newspapers as the deepest divisions of contemporary political discourse.

     The dynamic of an Ibsen play is an action of exposing what is false behind the appearance of truth and in one’s own identity and beliefs.  The play sets in motion an action that gradually exposes both the contradictions in the world one inhabits and the forces in oneself (conventional ideas, beliefs, fears, loyalties) that prevent self-determination, freedom.    The antithetical 'radical' forces roused against this repressive condition themselves contain deep contradictions.  Rosmersholm is perhaps the clearest demonstration of this dialectic.  In contrast to the Shakespearean drama, in Ibsen disorder, conflict, are to be welcomed as the necessary condition of winning one’s way to truth and freedom.  The true condition of the human spirit is not peace, quietude, but incessant, critical restlessness of mind.  Dialectic is the movement (evolution) of human consciousness engaging with reality and its contradictions.

MORE ON DIALECTIC

     The world we 'know', our institutions, deeply held beliefs, our social and moral conventions, (how we believe we should behave in this world) and even our own identities were all formed over time (History).   They were formed from both deliberate and from unconscious misrepresentations, from doctrines and systems created by ‘interest groups’ and those often unjustly in power.   This includes our traditions of Faith, Education, notions of Right and Wrong, normal and abnormal, good and evil, etc. etc.  These ideas and beliefs are the ‘ghosts’ that infest our minds and our daily lives, and which Mrs. Alving saw as numerous at the grains of sand.  We are alienated from our potential selves within the potentia l world we could inherit.

       In a state of 'false consciousness' we experience and live in a world of fictions or unrealities that convince us they are real, and the quest for true and authentic living means a painful unlearning of all we have been brought up to ‘know’.  “To be yourself means to slay yourself”.  This is the ‘Socratic’ process, and it is an endless activity. 

The theorist and critic Terry Eagleton describes a form of dialectical realism that applies equally to Ibsen’s own ‘Realist’ method:

“Realism in this [dialectical] sense means more than simple representation....It means an art which penetrates through the appearances of social life to grasp their inner dynamics and dialectical interrelations. ...true knowledge is knowledge of the underlying mechanism of things.
The more a work of art succeeds in laying bare the hidden forces of history, the finer it will be.  There is a sense in which this kind of art is more real than reality itself, since by bringing out its inner structure it reveals what is most essential about it.   Reality, being a messy, imperfect sort of affair, quite often fails to live up to our expectations of it.”        

That is, reality has a ‘deep structure’ which Ibsen’s plays bring out.  His son, Sigurd Ibsen, wrote “Art gives liberty of action to forces and possibilities to which life does not grant the chance of coming into their rights”  (Ibsen’s Selected Plays,  xx)  In an Ibsen play the ‘reality’ on which the play opens progressively reveals itself as repressive false appearance: and the action of the play will be the continuous demolition of everyday reality’s claims in both its traditional and radical configurations.

    Ibsen’s staged ‘reality’continually is being subverted, shown to be both inadequate and false.  It is always ‘on the move’ and dissolving in front of our eyes.  One way he shows this is by infiltrating into the realism dimensions of symbolism and metaphor that contradict strict realism’s claim to being an adequate representation of reality.  These metaphoric and symbolic presences - in the verbal and visual imagery - imply excluded forces, possibilities and freedoms.  The symboloic and archetypal presences not there to 'inflate' realism with archetypal dimensions but to undermine its claim to adequacy as a representation of human reality.