Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel

(lit.: Correspondence on Tragedy)

Three friends argue by post for nine months over why tragedy moves us, and Lessing stakes everything on pity.

by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing129 passages held

German, the original language

First published: 1757(aged 28)
Original language: German

Overview

Friedrich Nicolai, a young Berlin bookseller, spent the summer of 1756 writing a treatise on tragedy for writers entering a prize for new plays, and Lessing, then living in Leipzig, had promised him a pile of loose thoughts on the subject. The letters that followed ran from August 1756 to May 1757, between Lessing on one side and Nicolai and Moses Mendelssohn, the Jewish philosopher, in Berlin. They were private and slow: Nicolai's first letter, dated 31 August, reached Lessing only in November, behind a second letter sent two months after it. Nicolai rejected the old claim, repeated since Aristotle, that tragedy exists to make its audience better, and remarked that the claim had filled the stage with well-meant bad plays. Lessing found the remark too clever to accept and argued the opposite. Tragedy does improve us, he wrote, by a single route: it trains our capacity for pity. Terror is pity taken by surprise; admiration is pity that is no longer needed; and the person most able to feel pity is the best person. Mendelssohn pressed him hardest on admiration, and in December 1756 pointed him to Winckelmann's new essay on imitating Greek art, the essay Laocoön would answer a decade later. Lessing went further and declared himself against Aristotle's own account of pity. He later reworked the argument in the Hamburg Dramaturgy, where he gave fear back the place beside pity that these letters had denied it. Robert Petsch edited the letters as a single book on tragedy in 1910.

Key concepts

What do these letters mean by pity?

Feeling another person's misfortune as if it touched us, a capacity Lessing thinks can be strengthened like any other. Tragedy, for him, is practice: each play that moves us to pity makes us readier to feel it outside the theatre. That is why he can claim that the most compassionate person is the best person, the one most fit for every social virtue.

How can terror and admiration both be kinds of pity?

Lessing places one just before pity and the other just after it. Terror is pity taken by surprise, the shock at a blow before we know whom it strikes. Admiration is pity no longer needed, felt when a hero bears suffering so well that our sympathy has nothing left to do. On this scheme every tragic feeling is measured by pity.

What is stage illusion, in this correspondence?

The state in which a play makes us forget for a while that what we see is not real. The letters argue that we gladly darken any clear reasoning that would break the illusion, which carries us into another climate and other circumstances. When the play ends, reason takes the helm again. How long feelings formed under illusion survive afterwards is the open question.

What is "intuitive knowledge" of a good quality?

Knowing a virtue by seeing it acted out rather than by being told about it. The letters hold that the wish to imitate a quality follows naturally from knowing it this way, which is how a hero on stage can make us want to be like him. Whether that quality must be admirable, or only good, is what Lessing and Mendelssohn dispute.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Pity as Tragedy's Whole Purpose

Does tragedy make its audience better, and if so, how? Lessing bets everything on a single answer: by exercising our capacity to feel with others.

Nicolai had dropped the old claim that tragedy exists to improve us, pointing to the well-meant bad plays it produced. Lessing found the remark too clever and argued back. Tragedy improves, though not by teaching lessons: it widens our ability to feel pity, and the most compassionate person is the best person, readiest for every social virtue. A play succeeds to the degree that it moves pity, not to the degree that its hero is admirable. To keep this single route, Lessing even set himself against Aristotle.

tragedy
pity
compassion
moral education
virtue
moral psychology
dramatic theory
aristotle
catharsis
tears
emotions
poetics
literary criticism
aesthetics

Enter a dialogue

Terror and Admiration as Forms of Pity

Where do the theatre's other feelings come from, if pity is all that matters? Lessing folds them into pity, and Mendelssohn refuses to let him.

Terror, in Lessing's letters, is pity taken by surprise, felt before we know whom the blow will strike. Admiration is pity that has become unnecessary, because the hero rises above misfortune and needs no one's sympathy. Mendelssohn pressed hardest here. The letters argue over whether seeing a good quality acted out makes us want to imitate it, and how stage illusion lets us feel what clear reason would forbid. Lessing would later, in the Hamburg Dramaturgy, give fear the independent place these letters denied it.

admiration
fear
wonder
heroism
emotion
character
aesthetic pleasure
aesthetic experience
illusion
imitation
affect theory
passions
cognition
friendship
epic poetry

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 129
distinct concepts: 155
by passages held, corpus-wide: #452

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “pity” and “tragedy”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 26 pairings. 76 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
pity	tragedy	20
admiration	tragedy	18
emotions	tragedy	16
aesthetics	tragedy	14
compassion	tragedy	12
dramatic theory	tragedy	12
admiration	pity	11
aesthetics	emotions	10
admiration	compassion	9
admiration	dramatic theory	9
compassion	dramatic theory	7
moral psychology	tragedy	7
admiration	emotions	6
aesthetics	compassion	6
compassion	emotions	6
admiration	aesthetics	5
admiration	moral psychology	5
dramatic theory	pity	5
emotions	pity	5
aesthetics	moral psychology	4
dramatic theory	emotions	4
emotions	moral psychology	4
aesthetics	dramatic theory	3
aesthetics	pity	3
moral psychology	pity	2
compassion	moral psychology	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1755 Pope ein Metaphysiker!
Written jointly with Moses Mendelssohn early in their friendship, this pamphlet first drew the line between poet and philosopher that Laocoön would later redraw between poet and painter.
DE
1757 Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel you are here DE
1766 Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie)
Prepared in Breslau, where Lessing served a Prussian general from 1760 to 1765, this is the one part Lessing published of a larger planned study, and it carries over the poet–philosopher divide of his Pope essay into the arts.
DE
1767 Hamburg Dramaturgy (Hamburgische Dramaturgie)
A periodical before it was a book, written week by week for a theatre that did not last, this became Lessing's principal work on the theory of drama.
DE
1777 Kleine Schriften zum Fragmentenstreit
Short pamphlets from 1777 and 1778, written as the fragments controversy moved from courteous replies to Schumann toward the open feud with Goeze.
DE
1778 A Rejoinder (Eine Duplik)
A reply to a single defender of the Easter accounts, written in the winter of 1777–78, just before the quarrel with Goeze crowded out every other exchange.
DE
1778 Anti-Goeze
The centre of the fragments controversy; after the duke's ban the same argument moved into Nathan the Wise.
DE
1778 Axioms (Axiomata, wenn es deren in dergleichen Dingen giebt)
Argued point by point rather than fought, this answer to Goeze sets out in compact form the distinction between the Bible and religion that the Anti-Goeze letters defend with ridicule.
DE
1778 Ernst and Falk: Dialogues for Freemasons (Ernst und Falk. Gespräche für Freimäurer)
Dialogue rather than treatise, and written for Freemasons rather than about them, this is where Lessing carried the tolerance argument of his theological quarrels into a theory of civil society.
DE
1780 The Education of the Human Race (Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts)
Its hundred numbered paragraphs, begun inside the fragments controversy and finished after it, turn the quarrel over scripture into a single picture of religious history.
DE
1784 Gotthold Ephraim Leßings theologischer Nachlaß (Theologischer Nachlass)
An editorial title for papers Lessing kept to himself: two of them come from his early twenties in Berlin, decades before the fragments controversy made his religious views public.
DE
1795 Philosophischer Nachlass
Working notes on metaphysics that Lessing kept to himself, from his Breslau years onward; at least one reached print only after Jacobi's report had made his Spinozism a public question.
DE

— or open another of their works