Friedrich Nietzsche

Lee Spinks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415263597
• eBook ISBN: 9781134503476
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

It is difficult to imagine a world without common sense, the distinction between truth and falsehood, the belief in some form of morality or an agreement that we are all human. But Friedrich Nietzsche did imagine such a world, and his work has become a crucial point of departure for contemporary critical theory and debate. This volume introduces this key thinker to students of literary and cultural studies, offering a lucid account of Nietzsche's thought on: * anti-humanism * good and evil * the Overman * nihilism * the Will to Power. Lee Spinks prepares readers for their first encounter with Nietzsche's most influential texts, enabling them to begin to apply his thought in studies of literature, art and contemporary culture.

KEY IDEAS

1

TRAGEDY

Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, first published in German in 1872, occupies a curious position in the development of his thought. It is here that he introduces a series of concepts and distinctions that have become definitive of a ‘Nietzschean’ style of thinking. In fewer than 120 pages, Nietzsche redefines the relation between art, science and philosophy, and marks a distinction between the proper and improper use of history for the production of ‘strong’ values. The Birth of Tragedy also introduces a creative antagonism between the forces of Apollo (God of sunlight, order and harmony) and Dionysius (God of wine, revel and disorder) that became central to his work. He then goes on to deliver a number of remarks about democracy, modernity and the modern ‘rabble’ that have defined his image in the popular imagination. Fourteen years later, however, in his ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’, Nietzsche condemns The Birth of Tragedy as an ‘impossible’ and ‘fanatical’ book and retracts two of its most celebrated claims, namely that tragedy offers us a ‘new art of metaphysical consolation’ for the terrors of existence, and that the modern German spirit, personified by the composer Richard Wagner (1813–88), represents the culmination and realisation of the Greek genius.

The compositional history of The Birth of Tragedy makes clear an important aspect of Nietzsche’s intellectual style. His philosophy is not ‘systematic’ in the sense that its earliest insights and ideas are gradually developed into a completely coherent vision of the world. Instead, Nietzsche’s writing expresses a form of passionate argument that continually examines and revises its main propositions according to their power to extend the creative capacity of a particular form of life. To make sense of Nietzsche’s work, then, we need to replace traditional concerns about the consistency of a philosophical corpus with a series of questions about what makes a text or position possible and necessary at this particular stage in his development. For example, why would a philosopher with such a polemical attitude to modernity choose to address this issue by means of a discussion of Greek tragedy, and what statements about history and cultural value did it enable him to make? And what did Nietzsche find significant in classical Greek culture to make this discussion valuable in the first place?

To begin with the first question, Nietzsche is interested in tragedy because it offers the supreme example of an art form that provides insight into the strength and weakness of a culture. The experience of tragedy, he argues, forces a culture to reconsider or revalue its values; and Nietzsche notes later that ‘Birth of Tragedy was my first revaluation of all values’ (1990b: 121). Tragic art compels such a revaluation because it yields a profound insight into the depth and terror of human experience. It does so by teaching us that humanity’s potential to develop a vital and expansive existence is fundamentally linked to its capacity to endure suffering and terror. The Greeks, Nietzsche argues, developed a tragic art because they had the strength to envisage life as a continuous cycle of creation and destruction. This vision required strength because it affirmed the whole of life – including violence, struggle and conquest – instead of celebrating merely its most elevated and ‘civilised’ manifestations. The importance of tragic art for Nietzsche is that it enabled the Greeks to experience the chaos and force of a thoroughly pre-cultural and inhuman form of life. Tragedy expressed some of the most profound and vital aspects of what to means to be human – the lust for power and dominion, the primal force of sexuality, the desire to smash outmoded structures and create a new vision of the world – that we have subsequently repressed in order to become civilised beings. Indeed, the later experience of Greek tragedy puts into question what we think of as ‘moral’ and ‘civilised’ values and forces us to consider the types of value we must create in order to develop a powerful, dynamic and expansive way of life.

TRAGEDY, ART AND CULTURE

The philosophical question of which values a culture should strive to develop had important historical and political dimensions for Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy was composed during the Franco-German war of 1870–1. For Nietzsche, this conflict of nation-states, combined with the simultaneous rise of both socialism and political nationalism, represented a crisis of European cultural confidence. His response to this crisis, as we will see in Chapter 5, was to call for an aristocratic or ‘great’ politics that rejected the idea of equal rights and the claims of national identity in order to privilege only the most vital and powerful forces within a culture. This aristocratic politics, he claimed, was the driving force behind ancient Greek society, art and culture. Nietzsche also saw in Greek life a potential solution to the question posed by the malaise of modern culture and politics: what is the value of existence? Why was it, he asks, that the most beautiful and accomplished race of mankind was the one to develop a specifically tragic art? Nietzsche saw no contradiction in this state of affairs. He suggests, instead, that the ability to embrace the extreme pessimism of tragedy was the quality that enabled the genius of Greek culture to emerge:

Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual predilection for what is hard, terrible, evil, problematic in existence, arising from well-being, overflowing health, the abundance of existence? Is it perhaps possible to suffer from overabundance? A tempting and challenging, sharp-eyed courage that craves the terrible as one can crave the enemy, the worthy enemy, against whom it can test its strength?

(1993: 3–4)

Nietzsche’s radical redefinition of Greek cultural history makes a distinction between art and tragedy on the one hand and philosophy and science on the other. It is an intellectual commonplace, he contends, that the main burden of our inheritance from the Greeks is the glory of their achievements in philosophy and science. To conceive of Greek thought is to call to mind the moral philosophy of Socrates (470–399 BC), the new cosmology of Plato’s (427–347 BC) Timaeus, Aristotle’s (384–322 BC) reformulation of scientific method in his Posterior Analytics and Pythagoras’ (c. 560–480 BC) revolutionary innovations in mathematics. Intellectual events like these created a fundamental rupture in the history of western thought, and placed new ideas of reason, morality and logic at the heart of intellectual endeavour. Yet it was precisely these accomplishments, Nietzsche argues, that represent the eclipse, rather than the apotheosis, of classical Greek culture. For what is the purpose of establishing the supremacy of abstract and ideal conceptions of morality, reason and logic except to ‘ward off the image of everything terrible, evil, cryptic, destructive and deadly underlying existence’ (1993: 6)? This sequestration of ‘reason’ and ‘morality’ from an experience of inhuman and destructive forces cut Hellenic thought off from the total economy of life. Moreover, it is this weakened and restricted notion of life – a notion of life defined by rational and moral norms – that we have inherited from the Greeks and that forms the basis for our modern ideas of moral and cultural value. Now we have ideas about life (such as democracy, egalitarianism or moral virtue) rather than experiencing the radical force of life that was kept alive by the Greek tragic spirit. Humanity has never been so ‘moral’ and so ‘healthy’, Nietzsche laments, and yet it has never been so neurotic either. Might we not then conclude, in the face of all ‘modern ideas’ and the prejudice of democratic taste, that ‘the victory of optimism, the now predominant reason, practical and theoretical utilitarianism, like democracy itself, with which it is coeval, is a symptom of waning power, of approaching senescence, of physiological fatigue’? (p. 7).

Nietzsche’s response to this melancholy history is fundamentally to transform our perception of the relationship between being and value. One of the principal problems of modern culture, he argues, is that a form of life is judged according to is capacity to conform to certain moral norms. These normative moral standards may be embodied in religious appeals to charity and forbearance, or political calls for equal rights and social democracy; what all such norms share is the perception of a common and universal set of values that gives human life its meaning and justification. But instead of judging life from the point of view of morality, Nietzsche declares, we need to determine the value of morality from the perspective of life (1993: 7). This insistence explains his life-long fascination with Greek tragic art. The genius of Greek tragedy, Nietzsche claims, lay in its capacity to open itself to the myriad force of life without adopting a moral perspective. Tragedy, in Nietzschean terms, forms the basis for a non-moral vision of life. Conversely, the demise of Greek tragedy occurred when life was subjected to an explicitly moral evaluation. ‘Morality’ in The Birth of Tragedy is the product of a decadent interpretation of life that accompanies the destruction of Greek tragic culture. This tragic culture was destroyed when the Greeks no longer had the strength to affirm the inhuman and destructive power of life. Instead, they raised a number of abstract concepts above life in order to regulate its chaotic force. The most pernicious of these concepts, Nietzsche argues, was morality. The destruction of Greek tragedy arrives, then, with the production of an idea of life (the ‘moral life’) that is turned against life. In contrast, Nietzsche joins with the ancient Greeks in asserting that ‘the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon’ (p. 8). The power of tragic art – indeed, all art – for Nietzsche lies in its expression of a profound ‘counter-moral tendency’ that refuses to subordinate life to conceptual fictions like ‘morality’ and ‘truth’, or endorse a division between reason and truth on one hand, and art and falsehood on the other. Instead, Nietzsche’s Greek tragic art challenges all values hostile to life by affirming a vision of existence ‘based on appearance, art, deception, point of view, the necessity of perspective and error’ (p. 8). The noblest mode of life is not submission to universal moral norms; it is rather, as Nietzsche wrote in The Gay Science, to give aesthetic shape to our character by surveying all that our nature presents of strength and weakness and then moulding it into ‘an artistic plan’ until each of our aspects is integrated into a powerful expression of personality (1974: 232). Art is thereby transformed into the highest principle of existence by revealing the multiple ways that life comes into being. Art gives a purposive shape to experience in the active creation of values.

The ‘revaluation’ of life implicit in Nietzsche’s particular view of tragedy may be illustrated by reference to one of the most famous Greek tragedies: Sophocles’ (496–c.413 BC) Oedipus Rex. The play tells of the tragic fall of Oedipus, King of Thebes. When the play begins, Thebes is in turmoil: the harvests have failed, and the gods have abandoned the city. In desperation, Oedipus asks Creon, his wife’s brother, to consult Apollo and attempt to discover the reason for their calamitous state. Creon returns with the news that Thebes has been stricken because the murderers of its former ruler, Laius – whose wife, Jocasta, Oedipus has subsequently married – have never been brought to account. Oedipus immediately proclaims that he will dispel the plague upon Thebes by finding and banishing the miscreant. Indeed, Oedipus declares, were the murderer to be discovered hiding in his own palace, he would be prepared to share this awful punishment. From this point Oedipus’ fate unravels with terrifying rapidity. First, he is informed by the blind seer Tiresias that the man he seeks is not just Laius’ murderer: he is also Laius’ son, who will go on to marry his own mother. Then he is told the worst news of all: the man he seeks is no other than himself! Oedipus’ furious insistence that the facts of this matter do not match his own case – he was born the son of Polybus, King of Corinth, and his father has recently died of natural causes – is insufficient to avert his tragic destiny. For it gradually emerges that Oedipus was in fact fathered by Laius, only to be abandoned on a hillside in fear of a prophecy that he would live to kill his own father. Spared by a gentle shepherd, he was taken to Corinth, where he was raised within the royal household. The rest is too awfully predictable: dealt with discourteously by Laius at an isolated crossroads, Oedipus strikes and kills his own father. He compounds this horror by marrying Jocasta, his own mother, in fulfilment of the prophecy. The appalling revelation of Oedipus’ true identity leads Jocasta to hang herself and Oedipus to put out his own eyes. The play ends in this mood of unremitting bleakness by depicting the fragility of human existence and the pitilessness of fate.

The traditional response to Oedipus’ fall is that it offers us a terrifying moral lesson in the consequences of overstepping the boundaries to human ambition set by the gods. The tragedy presents the dark knowledge that the pattern of our life is determined by a divinely ordained destiny or ‘fate’, which we are powerless to alter. The most famous expression of this view is Aristotle’s interpretation of tragedy as a form that generates pity and fear in order to purge mankind of its attraction to the destructive power of life by ‘the sacrifice of the hero in the interest of a moral view of the world’ (1993: 107). In modern times, following the pyschoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Oedipus’ tragedy has been transformed into an individual ‘complex’ and rewritten as a bourgeois family drama. Thus Freud argued that every boy imagines himself to be his mother’s lover and consequently wishes to kill his paternal rival. However, the father’s presence looms large as a pervasive threat of violence and castration. Accordingly, the boy learns to repress his Oedipal desire for his mother, identify with his father’s role, and accept his future responsibilities as a worker and head of the family. In both of these readings, ‘fate’ has a moral meaning: fate is an order to be obeyed or a structure to which we ought to reconcile ourselves. For Nietzsche, however, fate is ruthless, meaningless, inhuman and excessively forceful. The inhuman ferocity of fate dominates the tragedy of Oedipus, where destiny is utterly destructive of the moral and familial order.

Nietzsche’s reading of Greek art works explicitly against a moral reading of tragedy that would merely describe tragedy as an interplay of personalities. He insists, instead, that tragedy stages a violent confrontation between our most powerful drives and passions that takes us far beyond the fictions of the ‘moral individual’. Tragedy is best understood neither as a hero’s conflict with social forces nor as a personal Oedipal complex. For Nietzsche, the tragedy of Oedipus awakens us to inhuman natural forces that shatter our preconceived ideas about the value of ‘knowledge’ and ‘morality’. He argues that Oedipus’ experiences provide him with a fateful insight into the most sacred mysteries of nature. By solving the riddle posed by the Sphinx and thereby saving Thebes from destruction, Oedipus has ‘clairvoyant’ and ‘magical’ powers conferred upon him that allow him to overcome mankind’s separation from nature and the inhuman realm of the gods (1993: 47). However, the wisdom that Oedipus acquires also represents an ‘abominable crime against nature’ because he triumphed over the Sphinx by breaking the ‘spell of the past and the future’ that fate casts over mankind. To break this spell is to destroy the ‘rigid law of individuation’ that enables every human being to detach itself from the chaotic flux of nature and constitute itself as an autonomous and moral form of life. By overcoming the Sphinx, Oedipus refuses to see life as something that happens to ‘us’ according to the iron law of fate; rather, he becomes one with the force of life by affirming his sovereign will over every external law and prohibition. Oedipus therefore becomes more than human by defying the moral law. This, for Nietzsche, is the tragic paradox of Oedipus’ story: he can only experience the supreme force of life at the moment that his moral individuality is rendered meaningless. The tragic dissolution of Oedipus’ moral being manifests itself to us in his two terrible crimes against nature – incest and parricide – that destroy his moral universe and leave him an outcast and exile.

Oedipus the King, then, discloses a vision of the inhuman power of life that exceeds and threatens the moral evaluation of ‘man’. Its mythic reconciliation of humanity with the subjugated and repressed force of nature is described by Nietzsche as the Dionysiac function of tragedy. However, this vision of the power of amoral and inhuman natural being has the potential to overwhelm humanity and render its existence petty and futile. The genius of Greek tragedy, for Nietzsche, was to preserve the memory of our primal and pre-moral bond with nature within an aesthetic form – the narratives, characters and images of tragic drama – that represented these primal energies in human terms. This is what Nietzsche called the ‘magical’ and Apollonian function of tragic art: the aesthetic structuring and reproduction of amoral natural forces in order that we might transcend the moral interpretation of existence:

Sophocles saw the most suffering character on the Greek stage, the unhappy Oedipus, as the noble man who is predestined for error and misery despite his wisdom, but who finally, through his terrible suffering, exerts a magical and beneficial power that continues to prevail after his death. The noble man does not sin, the profound poet wishes to tell us: through his actions every law, every natural order, the whole moral world can be destroyed, and through the actions a higher magic circle of effects is drawn, founding a new world on the ruin of the old, now destroyed.

(1993: 46)

APOLLO AND DIONYSIUS

The two major concepts introduced in The Birth of Tragedy are the Apollonian and the Dionysiac. Nietzsche begins by arguing that ‘art derives its continuous development from the duality of the Apolline and the Dionysiac’ (1993: 14). Apollo represents the capacity for order, clarity, proportion and formal harmony within the Greek spirit. This power reaches its apotheosis in Greek sculpture and visual art; but it also manifests itself in the classical desire to treat the self as a work of art and develop a strong well-shaped character. Apollo therefore represents a divine image of the principium individuationis: the wellfashioned character who stands apart from the multitude (p. 16). In contrast, Dionysius represents a state of chaotic and ecstatic energy which threatens the integrity of every formal structure. The cult of Dionysius celebrates sexuality, unconscious desire and the amorality of natural forces; it seeks to destroy the cultivated ‘individuation’ of the autonomous individual and reunite us with the ‘innermost core’ of nature (p. 76). The Dionysiac finds aesthetic expression in the primal force and narcotic rhythms of music, which intoxicate the listener into a ‘complete forgetting of the self ’ (p. 17).

Apollonian art has, for Nietzsche, both a fo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Why Nietzsche?
• Key Ideas
• After Nietzsche
• Further Reading
• Works Cited