Bound to the Apollonian Sphere...

Nietzsche on Sophocles' "Oedipus"

Excerpts from the video:

Every successful attempt at moving from ignorance to knowledge produces the opposite effect as intended. The pursuit of the knowledge of who killed the previous King is an attempt to deliver the land of Thebes from sorrow and despair, and yet this brings about further sorrow and despair. That element of the play structure is recognized by the likes of Nietzsche as a subtle Sophoclean critique against excessive knowledge, excessive wisdom, which is quite in keeping with Nietzsche's philosophical outlook.

But that might leave us to wonder what somebody like Aristotle would have thought of this, why he would have such a high praise for Oedipus, being that Aristotle is a philosopher who sees the truth as a good? Well, for Aristotle, the Oedipus play is superb because it fulfills the function of tragedy, which is to allow us a catharsis, a release of negative emotion, the fear for Oedipus that we experience, and the pity that we experience for his plight. These are for Aristotle, negative emotions. And the tradition of Platonic thought, these are vicious emotional states because they're harmful to our character. So Plato thought that we should therefore avoid tragedy, because it makes us experience those feelings under the theory that experiencing the feeling, reinforces it. Aristotle's opposing perspective to that, is that by indulging in dramatic tragedy, we purge those feelings, so that by experiencing the negative emotion we discharge it. And whichever of these perspectives we may happen to find convincing, the point here is that Aristotle sees in Oedipus the maximal possibility for heightened fear and pity, the maximal possibility for therefore the catharsis the purging of those feelings, and the reason why it achieves this maximal height of those feelings is because every attempt at avoiding the tragedy, or of righting the past wrongs produces, instead, this recognition that the opposite has happened. And so through no fault of his own, through no moral culpability, Oedipus finds himself guilty of the worst crimes.