Drama
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long). So just as in the case of physical objects and living organisms, they should possess a certain magnitude, and this should be such that it can readily be taken in at one view [eusynopton], so in the case of plots: they should have a certain length, and this should be such that it can readily be held in memory.21 The drama is a model. The perceptible has to yield to the laws of comprehension and memory retention. The priority of drawing (logos) over colour (senses), which later becomes important in the theory of painting, is already called upon for comparison here, with the ordering structure of the fable-logos towering above all: ‘If someone were to apply exquisitely beautiful colours at random he would gives less pleasure than if he had outlined an image in black and white.’22 That tragedy, according to Aristotle, due to its logical-dramatic structure could even do entirely without a real staging, that it would not even need the theatre to develop its full effect, is only the logical conclusion and extreme consequence of this ‘logification’. Theatre itself, the visible staging (‘opsis’) is already for Aristotle the realm of the incidental, the merely sensuous – and, notably, ephemeral and transitory – effects, later increasingly also the site of ‘illusion’, deception and imposture. By contrast, dramatic logos since Aristotle has been attributed with the advance of logic behind deceptive illusion. Its dramaturgy reveals the ‘laws’ behind the appearances. Not without reason Aristotle considers tragedy more ‘philosophical’ than historiography: it demonstrates an otherwise hidden logic according to conceptual ‘necessity’ and equally analytically graspable ‘probability’. As the belief in the possibility of such ‘modelability’ – strictly separated and separable from everyday reality – disappeared, the reality or ‘worldliness’ of the theatrical process itself came to the fore. The border between world and model that had promoted a sense of security dissolved. With that, an essential basis of dramatic theatre broke down that was axiomatic for occidental aesthetics, namely the totality of the logos. The complicity of drama and logic, and then drama and dialectic, dominates the European ‘Aristotelian’ tradition – which turns out to be highly alive even in Brecht’s ‘non-Aristotelian drama’. The beautiful is conceptualized according to the model of the logical, as its variant. A climax of this tradition is Hegel’s aesthetics. Under the general formula of the beautiful ideal as a ‘sensuous appearance of the idea’, it unfolds a complex theory of actualization of the Spirit in the respective artistic material, all the way up to poetic language. At the same time, it can be shown through Hegel’s aesthetics why the idea of drama could have been so powerful: it could never have developed such a farreaching efficacy if it had not been designed deeper and richer in contradictions than its abridgement to the dramaturgical result, i.e. the schema of the dramatic genre, would suggest. I shall, therefore, sketch the complex line of Hegel’s speculative theory of drama in some of its aspects by drawing on reflections by Christoph Menke.23