The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
[Nietzsche] failed, as all moderns must fail when they attempt, like him, to embrace the tragic spirit as a religious faith, because the resurgence of that faith is not an intellectual but a vital phenomenon, something not achieved by taking thought but born, on the contrary, out of an instinctive confidence in life which is nearer to the animal's unquestioning allegiance to the scheme of nature than it is to that critical intelligence characteristic of a fully developed humanism. And like other faiths it is not to be recaptured merely by reaching an intellectual conviction that it would be desirable to do so.
-Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper
Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest
problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own
inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest
types-that is what I called Dionysian, that is what
I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of
the tragic poet. Not so as to get rid of pity and
terror, not so as to purify oneself of a dangerous
emotion through its vehement discharge but,
beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the
eternal joy of becoming-that joy which also
encompasses joy in destruction.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
For our Senior January at Colgate, Chuck & I took a course on Socrates with Professor Kraynak, who was not only one of the only conservative professors that I have ever met in academe, he may have been the only one who was just clearly the smartest person in the room. Despite the considerable obstacle posed by his mandatory attendance policy, I thoroughly enjoyed this class and the subsequent political science class I took with him.
One of the texts we read for the Socrates course was Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche's central argument is that Greek Tragedy was the apotheosis of human arts because it best expressed the beautiful "terror and horror of existence". Nietzsche posited two competing elements: the Dionysian--representing music, primal urges and ecstasy; and the Apollonian--representing the restraint and control of sculpture, dreams and prophecy. To him Attic tragedy had struck just the right balance, with the Apollonian impulse toward order only just succeeding in adding structure to the primordial beauty of Dionysian instinctive savagery:
...in the ecstasy of the Dionysian state, with its
annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of
existence, there is contained a lethargic element,
in which we are submerged all past personal
experiences. It is this gulf of oblivion that
separates the world of everyday from the world of
Dionysian reality. But as soon as we become
conscious of this everyday reality, we feel it as
nauseating and repulsive; and an ascetic will-negating
mood is the fruit of these states. ... But at this
juncture, when the will is most imperiled, art approaches,
as a redeeming and healing enchantress;
she alone may transform these horrible reflections
on the terror and absurdity of existence into
representations with which man may live. These
are the representation of the sublime as the
conquest of the awful, and of the comic as the artistic
release from the nausea of the absurd.
Yes, he says, life is awful, but art makes it endurable and Greek tragedy was the pinnacle of art.
But then a new force came upon the scene; as Socrates and scientific reason introduced a new, and for Nietzsche destructive, element into the equation which brought the reign of Dionysus to an end. Socrates enunciated three maxims:
-Virtue is knowledge
-Man sins only from ignorance
-He who is virtuous is happy
and as Nietzsche said, "In these three fundamental forms of optimism lies the death of tragedy." This optimism Nietzsche believed to be an illusion, "the imperturbable belief that, with the clue of logic, thinking can reach to the nethermost depths of being, and that thinking can not only perceive being but even modify it." Therefore, Nietzsche called for a return to Dionysian drama and believed that German artists and philosophers were uniquely suited to lead this rebirth of tragedy. In fact, the book is dedicated to Richard Wagner, whom Nietzsche saw as the artist most likely to succeed in this task. But then Wagner wrote Parsifal, with its Christian themes, and the two became estranged.
I don't have any particular argument with Nietzsche's assessment of the historical facts. But he's basically just arguing for the kind of amoral Franco-German existentialism that has made both of those peoples and their cultures so unpleasant. The philosophers of the European continent have for two centuries now fought a rearguard action against both Judeo-Christianity and the Age of Reason. But Western Civilization is ultimately a product of these two great ideological revolutions and by any measure, you'd have to say that their adherents have the better of this argument.
One brief discussion in here suffices to show how Nietzsche's sort of weird prejudices warped his capacity to think clearly--his comparison of Prometheus and the Fall of Man. He completely misreads the two stories to say:
The best and highest that man can acquire they must
obtain by a crime, and then they must endure
its consequences, namely the whole flood of sufferings
and sorrows with which the offended
divinities must requite the nobly aspiring race
of man. It is a bitter thought, which by the dignity it
confers on crime, contrasts strangely with the Semitic
myth of the fall of man, in which curiosity,
deception, weakness in the face of temptation, wantoness,--in
short, a whole series of preeminently
feminine passions,--were regarded as the origin
of evil. What distinguishes the Aryan conception is
the sublime view of active sin as the essential
Promethean virtue, and the discovery of the ethical
basis of pessimistic tragedy in the justification
of human evil--of human guilt as well as of the
suffering incurred thereby.
This is, of course, pure rot. In fact, the Promethean myth (see Orrin's review) is based on a semi-divine being stealing fire and giving it to man. Genesis features man as the active hero, taking from the Tree of Knowledge himself and suffering the consequences himself, instead of just leaving Prometheus to have his entrails ripped out daily. Failing to understand the stories, Nietzsche draws the wrong conclusions:
He who understands this innermost core of the Prometheus
myth--namely, the necessity of crime
imposed on the titanically striving individual--will
at once feel the un-Apollonian element in this
pessimistic representation. For Apollo seeks
to calm individual beings precisely by drawing
boundary lines between them, and by again and again,
with his requirements of self-knowledge and
self-control, recalling these bounds to us as the
holiest laws of the universe.
Nietzsche's vision of Man, necessarily fueled by individual striving and crime, represents a return to Hobbes's state of nature. It has a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest appeal, but there is no reason to believe that it would lead to progress for Man as a species. Look at the nations where law and morality have ceased to function--Somalia, Columbia, Rwanda, etc.--and show me anything good that has come of it. It turns out that Man's greatest strides have come in precisely those cultures which have embraced the Apollonian. Apparently, self-knowledge and self-control aren't such a bad deal at the end of the day.
I'm not going to try to deny Nietzsche's brilliance nor his importance,
but I do deny the value of his philosophy to humankind. You've got
to be familiar with his work, but God help anyone who buys what he's selling.
(Reviewed:29-May-00)
Grade: (C)
