Editor’s Introduction

Abstract

Some twenty-five years ago Walter Kaufmann opened his Tragedy and Philosophy by questioning what he called the presumption of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle that they were superior in wisdom to the tragic poets. In a sense his book was an effort to set the record straight, to show not so much who are the wisest, the philosophers or the tragic poets, but that the latter too were wise. ′Let us disown′, he wrote,

two equally extreme generalizations: one sees the poet as a singularly wise philosopher, the other, as a man whose business is with words and sounds, with language, possibly with plot and characters, but not with anything remotely philosophical. Both views approximate the truth about some poets. Regarding the great tragic poets, the first though wrong, is much more nearly right: Aeschylus and Euripides, Goethe and Ibsen were, beyond question, intellectuals, full of ideas; and while Sophocles and Shakespeare were not quite that intellectual, they, too, projected their own vision of the world and man’s condition. (pp. 93-4)