ABSTRACT
This chapter considers drama from a different angle in order to discuss ideas concerning the disruption, in the service of revealment, of familiarity and subversion of the appearance of ‘naturalness’. It deals with discussion of the way in which crises in the foundations of knowledge and belief are normally equated with a corresponding crisis of being. Martin Heidegger believed that the concept of naturalness served to conceal and distort a normally occurring type of crisis which stirs in the foundations of all defined domains of knowledge or belief. After specifying foundational crises in various domains: mathematics, physics, biology, and what he called ‘the historical and humanistic disciplines’, Heidegger indicated the refractoriness of theology as a discipline in confronting its own foundational crisis. The relationships between science, culture, the arts and indeed psychoanalysis at the fin de siecle are important in understanding the context within which Bertolt Brecht sought to bring about social change through his theatre.
