University of Sussex
Franz Solms-Laubach
Conference Paper Proposal:
“Reading Tragedy as an aesthetical ‘Science of Life’ – Friedrich Nietzsche and Alfred
Weber on the notion of ‘Tragedy in History’.”
Summary
Nietzsche is widely acknowledged as a seminal thinker in 19th century philosophy and greatly
influenced the literature and art of the time. Yet while these influences are, generally speaking,
commonly recognised in the secondary literature on Nietzsche, the decisive influence of his
‘aesthetical’ notions of science and culture and their respective impact on his own understanding of
the origins of Greek tragedy, as well as on that of many other thinkers, is frequently overlooked.
This is because many of his commentators regard Nietzsche’s writings either as part of traditional
philosophy, more specifically Lebensphilosophie, or alternatively as part of cultural critique, more
specifically as part of the critique of the increasing objectification of ‘culture’ and ‘art’ within
modernity. Yet the important fusion of these different strands of thinking in Nietzsche’s writings is
rarely acknowledged, even though it is this fusion of his irrational notion of ‘life’ and his
aesthetically grounded critique of ‘science’ and ‘culture’, which particularly helps to explain the
exceptional creativity and influence of Nietzsche’s analysis of the sociocultural development of
ancient Greece on later generations of philosophers and social thinkers. Even though his analysis of
The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1871) received a very critical reception at the time
of its first publication (cf. the reply by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf) or was, generally
speaking, largely ignored by his contemporary philologists, the important influence of his
aesthetical conception of the sociocultural development of ancient Greece on, for example, the
German sociologist Alfred Weber (1868-1958) cannot be denied.
Alfred Weber clearly used Nietzsche’s aesthetical theory of the sociocultural development of
ancient Greece, to develop his own distinctive notion of (a largely ‘intuitive’) ‘cultural sociology’,
which tried to interpret the sociocultural development of past historical stages on the basis of an
investigation of the real historical foundations of ancient cultures. To achieve this goal Weber
looked back at the changes in the sociocultural ‘habitus’ of ancient peoples and cultures over
centuries of time, to identify the cultural creations and exceptional achievements that marked the
decisive historical advances in these societies. It is the sociocultural development of ancient Greece
which particularly fascinated Alfred Weber, and which in many respects serves as a ‘test case’ for
his wider theory and methodology of the ‘sociology of culture’. In formulating his views of the
origins and function of tragedy in Greek history, Alfred Weber developed Nietzsche’s aesthetical
conception of the sociocultural development of ancient Greece into a scientific tool for the
systematic analysis of the sociocultural history of Greek antiquity. It is in this respect, that
Nietzsche’s cultural critique and his view of ancient Greece, as expressed in the Birth of Tragedy,
foreshadows or presents an early version of ‘cultural sociology’ in the sense later proposed by
Alfred Weber. The parallels to Nietzsche become even more evident when we look at Weber’s book
On Tragedy and History (1942), which tried to interpret the epic Greek tales as expressions of a
‘tragic world-view’ or a ‘tragic habitus’ that still holds important consequences for the cultural
development of our own cultural age.
In my paper I, therefore, interpret both Nietzsche’s and Weber’s intuitive accounts of the
sociocultural development of ancient Greece as clear reactions against what was seen as the
excessive rationalism of both traditional philosophy in general, and traditional historical accounts of
the sociocultural development of Greek antiquity in particular, which consequently share many
analytical and aesthetical elements that originate from Nietzsche’s writings. This paper, therefore,
concludes that Weber’s development of ‘cultural sociology’ is deeply shaped by a critical
engagement with Nietzsche’s sociocultural critique of ancient Greece, and is particularly apparent
in their shared notion of ‘Tragedy in History’, which basically reads Tragedy as an aesthetical
‘Science of Life’.