This Day in Philosophy — 14 August: the death of Bertolt Brecht

The German poet, playwright and theorist of the theatre Bertolt Brecht died on 14 August 1956, at the age of fifty-eight.

Brecht was a man of the theatre; but the legacy he left is a theory of aesthetics — and one that runs straight into questions about knowledge and politics.

Against Aristotle#

Classical theory of the theatre rests on Aristotle's Poetics: the spectator identifies with the hero on the stage, feels fear and pity, and at the end undergoes a purgation (catharsis).

Brecht wants to turn the mechanism inside out. Identification, as he sees it, satisfies the spectator emotionally and stops him thinking. The man leaving the auditorium is soothed — but he has asked nothing.

The alienation effect#

Brecht's solution is the Verfremdungseffekt: the alienation, or estrangement, effect. The aim is to make the familiar strange; to take what the spectator calls natural and turn it into something about which he can ask, why is it so?

To that end the stage does not conceal its own artifice. The actor does not become the character but exhibits him. Songs interrupt; placards announce the outcome in advance; the lights are left in view. What the spectator is constantly reminded of is this: what he is watching is a representation, and could therefore have been otherwise.

The philosophical core of this is a thought of Marx's: social relations appear natural and unalterable, whereas in fact they are historical. Brecht's theatre sets out to break that appearance.

The argument: Lukács and Adorno#

Brecht's approach was contested within Marxist aesthetics too.

György Lukács defended the realist novel and thought Brecht's formal experiments too close to the bourgeois avant-garde. Art, on his view, should grasp the social whole within a coherent narrative.

Theodor Adorno attacked from precisely the opposite quarter: Brecht's theatre was too didactic. For Adorno the critical force of art comes not from carrying a message but from its own form refusing to be reconciled. Art that teaches a political lesson directly falls into the very language of instrumental reason it opposes.

The argument — what art must do, and must not do, if it is to make people think — has not closed. It runs on across a wide field, from documentary theatre to political cinema, from conceptual art to games.

Brecht in Turkish#

Mother Courage and Her Children, Life of Galileo, The Good Person of Szechwan and The Threepenny Opera are among the plays translated into Turkish. His writings on the theory of the theatre have also been published in collected form.