Seite - 17 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 02/01

The Pedigree of Dualistic and Non-Dualistic Media | 17www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 15–22 desires. We are all monsters, and it is good for us to live in our monstrous ways. Hav- ing realised this, I regard it as important to accept that it is highly likely that any non- formal account of the good will be implausible.5 In light of the aforementioned examples of dualistic conceptualisations of the world, which seem highly problematic, I realised that we find analogous dualities in various aspects of our way of grasping the world. More though, it seemed to me that cultural processes usually occur in parallel events. Philosophers conceptualise the world in a dualistic manner and a similar process occurs in ethics or in the media. Is it always the case that historically a certain group, a discipline comes first? I do not know. Nietzsche suggested that music is a discipline in which the processes in ques- tion occur rather later than in other fields and disciplines. (Nietzsche, 1967-77, 450-452 = KSA MA, 2, 450-454) Such may be the case, but to my mind the processes do not seem to follow such given paradigms. Change seems to me more chaotic. Sometimes music comes last within the organic process of a culture, but in other circumstances it might come first. This question, however, would need to be discussed separately. Having reflected upon duality and non-duality for a long time, only recently I man- aged to connect two insights that I had had for some time but had not seen as con- nected, on the birth of dualistic thinking and on the dualistic media. In early August 2013, just before attending the World Congress of Philosophy in Athens, Jaime del Val, to whom I will return below, and I were on the island of Aegina and decided to attend a performance of The Cyclops by Euripides, which was being performed in the theatre at Epidaurus. The Cyclops is the only complete satyr play to have survived. During the performance, the dualities that had come about during the birth of Ancient Greek drama suddenly became clear, as I was confronted with the architectural prerequisites that had accompanied the institutionalisation of drama during the sixth century BCE. Originally, there had been no theatre buildings, no stage, and no spectators sepa- rated from the stage. Before the institutionalisation of tragedy, there had been only groups of human beings singing and dancing together, without a rigid dualistic spatial separation of actors and audience. Various categorical dualities were introduced only later, during the birth of tragedy. First, there was the spatial separation between audience and actors. The audience had to remain seated within certain linear and circular fields, which were separated from but also directed towards the circle, or stage, on which the actors were to ful- fil their tasks. Secondly, a further distinction was introduced, namely the distinction between chorus and protagonists: on the one hand, there was the chorus, and the task of the chorus was to sing and dance together; on the other hand, there were the individual actors, whose task was to recite their roles. Hence, the duality of audi- ence and actors was amplified with the introduction of the duality of protagonists and 5 Sorgner 2016.