Nietzsche: The Key Concepts

Peter R. Sedgwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134502776
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Nietzsche: The Key Concepts is a comprehensive guide to one of the most widely-studied and influential philosophers of the nineteenth century. This invaluable resource helps navigate the often challenging and controversial thought outlined in Nietzsche's seminal texts.

Fully cross-referenced throughout and in an accessible A-Z format with suggestions for further reading, this concise yet thorough introduction explores such ideas as:

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• decadence

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• epistemology

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• modernity

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• nihilism

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• will to power

This volume is essential reading for students of philosophy and will be of interest to those studying in the fields of literature, religion and cultural theory.

NIETZSCHE

The Key Concepts

AMOR FATI

Amor fati is love of fate. This attitude, Nietzsche tells us in Ecce Homo (‘The Wagner Case’, §4), characterises his ‘innermost nature’. The phrase initially occurs in The Gay Science (§276), where it is expressed in terms of Nietzsche’s desire to be a ‘Yes-sayer’, i.e. to be one that does not negate existence but affirms it, even in criticism: ‘Looking away shall be my only negation’. In this regard, love of fate is an essential constituent of the mature Nietzsche’s Dionysian aesthetic, for the deep desire to embrace existence and endow one’s life with a sense of justification requires that everything in life be affirmed – the key feature of the notion of eternal recurrence. Amor fati is Nietzsche’s formula for all that is great in humanity. It means not wishing anything at all to be different about one’s life: neither forwards nor backwards, nor in all eternity. To love fate means to love what happens because this is how it must happen: one cannot avoid this necessity without denying oneself and by implication condemning existence. One must therefore love what is even terrible about one’s life. Love of fate means, in effect, love of the inherent plurality of life, of the fact that every moment of joy brings with it the potential for loss and suffering. Nietzsche’s view is well illustrated by the following passage:

no one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself […]. No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives […]. One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole…But nothing exists apart from the whole!

(Twilight of the Idols, ‘The Four Great Errors’, §8)

Fate suspends the possibility of criticism and the only viable attitude that remains is love of existence. Such love, according to Nietzsche, is the prerequisite of all great creative achievement.

Further reading: Thiele 1990; Yovel 1986.

APOLLO/APOLLINIAN

The Apollinian is a notion that Nietzsche deploys in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. Apollo is the sun god of the Ancient Greeks, he is ‘the shining one’, the god of light and ‘of all plastic energies’ (Birth of Tragedy, §1), a figure who rules over the inner world of self-consciousness. The Apollinian aesthetic principle, whose first manifestation is in Homeric myth, presents an art world characterised in terms of dreams. It encapsulates a formalised aesthetic of constraint that channels and thus structures in such a way that artistic expression of the most formalised kind is rendered possible. The Apollinian is thus best expressed in terms of order and form, as the form-endowing force. It is strongly associated with the ‘principle of individuation’ in so far as by way of its formalistic aspect the individual is differentiated from the rest of reality to the extent that he or she can regard it with some degree of detachment and hence objectivity. The individuated element is most manifest in the Apollinian plastic art of sculpture. In contrast to the Apollinian stands the Dionysian. According to The Birth of Tragedy, the fusion of these two antagonistic principles underlies the great achievement of Ancient Greek tragedy. The Apollinian provided a structural condition wherein the Dionysian could be given its fullest expression in artistic form.

See also: art.

Further reading: Del Caro 1981; Gillespie and Strong 1988; Kaufmann 1974; Kemal et al. 1998; Schacht 1983; Tejera 1987.

ART

From the early, metaphysical speculations enshrined in The Birth of Tragedy to the final outpouring of his very last works (The Antichrist, Ecce Homo), the path of Nietzsche’s thought is patterned by a concern with the nature of art and the creative artist. Consistently this concern is also accompanied by an interest in the wider significance of the aesthetically conceived principles of the Dionysian and Apollinian, first elucidated in The Birth of Tragedy. Writing in a note of 1888, Nietzsche states that these two principles can be comprehended in the following manner:

The word ‘Dionysian’ means: an urge to unity, a reaching out beyond personality […] the great pantheistic sharing of joy and sorrow that sanctifies and calls good even the most terrible and questionable qualities of life […] the feeling of the necessary unity of creation and destruction. The word ‘Apollinian’ means: the urge to perfect self-sufficiency, to the typical ‘individual’, to all that simplifies, distinguishes, makes strong, clear, unambiguous, typical: freedom under the law. The further development of art is necessarily tied to the antagonism between these two natural artistic powers […].

(Will to Power, §1050)

The development in question is exemplified by the ‘monological’ conception of art Nietzsche discusses in Book 5, §367, of The Gay Science. This is a form of art that is authentic because it is the consequence of an act of creation that is bound by the internal logic of the artwork rather than exterior considerations. The concept of monological art is best illustrated by considering initially Nietzsche’s earlier claim in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, that the Dionysian and Apollinian principles form the condition for the emergence of Greek tragedy. This is because the mature Nietzsche’s assertion that there is such a thing as an authentic, monological mode of artistic creation is a later recapitulation of the ideas first developed in the earlier book.

In The Birth of Tragedy, both culture and human nature are envisaged as attaining their greatest possible expression through art: ‘art represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life’ (Birth of Tragedy, ‘Preface’). Nietzsche seeks to answer the question as to what might be the highest form of human activity that can serve as the goal of culture by way of the redemptive capabilities of art. Primarily, this involves focusing upon the Greek tragic form as the means of providing a clue to the way in which art can redeem humanity from the pain of individuated existence identified by Schopenhauerian pessimism as the cause of all human suffering. On the one hand, Nietzsche argues, we are presented with the Dionysian aspect of art. The Dionysian artist achieves a state of self-identification with a ‘primal unity’ (Birth of Tragedy, §5) which signifies a state of ‘oneness of man with nature’ (Birth of Tragedy, §3). This sense of oneness overthrows established social boundaries separating individuals. In the Greek Dionysian festivals, ‘nature for the first time attains her artistic jubilee; it is with them that the destruction of the principuum individuationis for the first time becomes an artistic phenomenon’ (Birth of Tragedy, §2). Under the sway of Dionysian ecstasy, Nietzsche argues, humanity experienced itself and its relationship with nature symbolically. In order for such symbolic experience to be possible, however, the ability to think symbolically must already be in place. The symbolic order that the Dionysian uses to achieve its expression is, in fact, the product of its apparent opposite: the Apollinian, the ‘symbolical analogue of the soothsaying faculty and of the arts generally, which make life possible and worth living’ (Birth of Tragedy, §1). Apollo is the ‘form-giving force, which reached its consummation in Greek sculpture’ (Kaufmann 1974, p. 128). The Apollinian is an artistic expression of the proportion and harmony of the human form. The Apollinian art of sculpture inhabits a world of images, with which may be contrasted the ‘nonimagistic, Dionysian art of music’ (Birth of Tragedy, §1). The Apollinian is ‘the principle of individuation’ which, through sculpture, presents an individuated human identity. In opposition to the Dionysian principle (a state analogous to that of ‘intoxication’), the Apollinian inhabits a symbolic world of ‘dreams’ (Birth of Tragedy, §1). Whereas the Dionysian engenders a state of ‘self-forgetfulness’, the Apollinian ‘dream experience’ consists (at the symbolic level) in that which is itself forgotten in Dionysian rapture. This is because what is forgotten in the Dionysian state, Nietzsche claims, is both the individuated existence of the self and the life-enhancing illusion which art is able to bestow upon life. This is why Dionysus needs Apollo: the Apollinian provides the Dionysian with the symbolic language that is used both to conceal the sublime Dionysian terror of existence and yet, in moments of Dionysian rapture, is simultaneously called upon in order to reveal it. For this reason, the harmonious, Apollinian consciousness of the Ancient Greek finds itself mirrored in the Dionysian state. Hence, the Apollinian individual’s response to the spectacle of the collective release of Dionysian festivity:

With what astonishment must the Apollinian Greek have beheld him [the Dionysian reveller]! With an astonishment that was all the greater the more it was mingled with the shuddering suspicion that all this was actually not so very alien to him after all, in fact, that it was only his Apollinian consciousness which, like a veil, hid this Dionysian world from his vision.

(Birth of Tragedy, §2)

In the Attic tragedy these two elements become reconciled in ‘an equally Dionysian and Apollinian form of art’ (Birth of Tragedy, §1). In the tragic form we have, on the one hand, the tragic chorus, ‘the symbol of the whole exited Dionysian throng’ (Birth of Tragedy, §1). Through the Dionysian state engendered by the chorus, the spectator’s individuality is sundered, so that he or she becomes an active participator within the tragedy. The dialogue of the tragedy, on the other hand, is Apollinian. Nietzsche notes that Sophocles’ language is remarkable precisely for its ‘Apollinian precision and lucidity’ (Birth of Tragedy, §1). This language is a mask, a veil which is a necessary consequence of seeing into the ‘terrors of nature’ (Birth of Tragedy, §9). The Dionysian excitement engendered by the chorus is ‘transferred […]to that masked figure’, which becomes an instantiated symbol of Dionysus: ‘now Dionysus no longer speaks through forces but as an epic hero’ (Birth of Tragedy, §8). In short, the tragic hero speaks symbolically through the language of Apollo, but speaks of the Dionysian terrors of existence. However, it would be incorrect to assert, in the light of this, that, for Nietzsche, the Apollinian grounds the Dionysian. The ‘bright image projections of the Sophoclean hero’ reveal the opposite of a linguistic, ‘optical phenomenon’ dependent upon images (Birth of Tragedy, §9). The imagery and language of the figures within the drama point us toward something of which they themselves can only be said to be its effects. Apollinian language is a mask that serves to conceal and reveal the Dionysian terror of existence at one and the same time (Birth of Tragedy, §10). The Dionysian and the Apollinian are thereby locked together inexorably. These two aspects need each other to such an extent that neither could be said to be primary: the communication of the non-imagistic reality of the world of nature must take place within the images of language, just as language must negate itself at the very moment it succeeds in presenting the Dionysian reality. It is for this reason that when the later dramatist Euripides spurned the Dionysian he also lost touch with the Apollinian. The greatness of the Attic tragedy, according to Nietzsche, lies in the equilibrium achieved within it of the Dionysian and Apollinian elements, in the constant interplay of the tension which exists between the two. But in what way does Euripides actually abandon Dionysus? The answer to this question leads directly to the monological aesthetics of the later Nietzsche, for it is in the role of the spectator that the key to Nietzsche’s view of art is to be found.

In the same way as the spectator in the theatre is able to ‘overlook’ those about him (both in the sense of to ignore and survey them) so, too, the tragic chorus both addresses and ignores its audience. This is because the ‘chorus is, first of all, a vision of the Dionysian mass of spectators’ (Birth of Tragedy, §8). This vision engenders in the spectator a state in which their sense of ‘reality’, in so far as this word refers to the social world comprising fellow spectators sitting there with them, is suspended. As such, the chorus is not actually addressing ‘spectators’ as an audience composed of civilised individuals engaged in a night out at the theatre. As a ‘Dionysian mass’, the chorus itself constitutes the audience of the play: the chorus is the servant of Dionysus and only addresses the individual spectator in so far as it excites the listeners’ mood to such a degree that with the appearance of the tragic hero they perceive ‘a visionary figure, born as it were from their own rapture’ (Birth of Tragedy, §8). The spectator is thereby invited to abandon his or her individuated identity and become a member of the chorus, a servant of Dionysus. Euripides, in contrast, commits the ultimate act of sacrilege against the Dionysian by introducing ‘the spectator onto the stage’ (Birth of Tragedy, §11). In this way, the spectator is invited to pass judgement on proceedings rather than becoming fused with them. In fact, this spectator is not to be found amongst the ‘masses in general’ but takes two forms: first, that of ‘Euripides himself, Euripides as thinker, not as poet’; second, the enemy of Dionysus and the inventor of dialectic, Socrates (Birth of Tragedy, §12). The poetic force of Dionysian art is in this fashion sundered by the demands placed upon it by logical thought. Socrates, a figure of ‘tremendous intellect’ in which ‘instinct becomes the critic and consciousness […] the creator’ (Birth of Tragedy, §13), marks a turning point in Greek culture whereby, through his pupil Plato, ‘philosophic thought overgrows art and compels it to cling close to the trunk of dialectic’ (Birth of Tragedy, §14). The rationalist demand that the world conform to the prescriptions of logical discourse thereby sunders the poetic vision of Dionysian tragedy. The individuated spectator, in other words, takes control of the aesthetic realm and demands that it serve the interests of ‘the theoretical man’ (Birth of Tragedy, §15). The theoretical man is the individuated being par excellence, and this individuated nature justifies itself through the theoretical dissolution of masks and illusions. It is for this reason that it must break with the Dionysian (which engenders loss of self) and must likewise be abandoned by the Apollinian, whose masked illusions and symbols operate in the service of Dionysus.

Nietzsche himself is a theoretical man, i.e. a thinker who dissolves illusions through analysis. But he also considers himself an advocate of the Dionysian. This engenders a tension that requires resolution, and the already-mentioned monological view of art outlined in §367 of The Gay Science represents an attempt to overcome theoretical traits, or at least render them irrelevant when it comes to the question of the meaning of art conceived of as a creative act. Through this one gets a clear view both of the mature Nietzsche’s conception of the nature of art and of the close relationship this view bears to his earlier writing. There is, Nietzsche argues, a distinction to be drawn between all works of art (and, indeed, attitudes of thought, too): ‘All thought, poetry, painting, compositions, even buildings and sculptures, belong either to monological art or to art before witnesses’ (Gay Science, §367). Whereas the latter gains its value from the spectator, the former presupposes ‘solitude’. In fact, what we are presented with here is an aesthetics which can be opposed to Kant’s, for, as Nietzsche argues in On the Genealogy of Morality, Kantian aesthetics depends upon an unconscious introduction of a spectator as the subject of moral judgement into the concept of the beautiful. As Laurence Lampert notes, the view of art presented here is rooted in the death of God; it is the aesthetics of a solitary, for whom God is no longer a possibility, and is hence an aesthetics which is ‘impossible in religion’ (Lampert 1993, p. 396). Significantly, however, there is perhaps one god before whom Nietzsche’s monological art can be practised, and that is Dionysus. Dionysian art is required by ‘those who suffer from the over-fullness of life – they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life, a tragic insight’ (Gay Science, §370). The difference between those who want Dionysian art and those impoverished souls who require art as a palliative to life resides not only in the latter’s requirement that art redeem them from themselves. Those who suffer from life also embrace ‘logic, the conceptual understandability of existence – for logic calms and gives confidence – in short, a certain warm narrowness that keeps away fear and encloses one in optimistic horizons’ (Gay Science, §370). In short, those who suffer from life are akin to Socrates, the worshipper of individuated logic and rationality (see Twilight of the Idols, ‘The Problem of Socrates’) and the culprit singled out as the destroyer of the tragic in The Birth of Tragedy. The parallels between the early and the later Nietzsche do not stop here. The creative, monological aesthetic also embraces a moment of forgetting which has its analogue in the forgetting of self experienced by the Dionysian worshipper. Thus, Nietzsche asserts that he cannot think

of any more profound difference in the whole orientation of an artist than this, whether he looks at his work in progress (at ‘himself’) from the point of view of the witness, or whether he ‘has forgotten the world,’ which is the essential feature of all monological art; it is based on forgetting, it is the music of forgetting.

(Gay Science, §367)

In other words, the creative act engenders the suspension of the social realm, of others. In the same way as the spectator of the Attic tragedy becomes a member of the chorus and servant of Dionysus so, too, the monological artist is dissolved into the creative act itself. Thus, through art, the self has become ‘the work in progress’, an Apollinian mask that simultaneously conceals and expresses Dionysian creative rapture. In Attic tragedy, the role of language is conceived in terms of its ability to engender within an audience a state of forgetting of self. In this state, the individuated subject loses its sense of identity and the ‘rational’, normative constraints of social life are abandoned along with it. In The Birth of Tragedy, the Apollinian language of tragedy thereby achieves the aesthetic effect of taking its audience beyond language into a realm of immediate aesthetic awareness of the violent, exhilarating world of becoming, where the individuated self is lost in a moment of reidentification with the natural world from which humanity sprung. Likewise, for the later Nietzsche, the monological artist creates in a manner that can only be conceived from the perspective of this state of abandonment of self, where the self becomes subsumed within the ‘music of forgetting’ (Gay Science, §367). The symbolic order of language and image is merely the product of this state, an Apollinian residue or mask that, in Dionysian works of art, points beyond itself. It is no coincidence, then, that Nietzsche describes one of his own pivotal experiences of artistic creation, that of writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in parallel terms: ‘You hear, you don’t search; you take, you don’t ask who is giving; li...