Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism

Brian Pines, Douglas Burnham, Brian Pines, Douglas Burnham

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501339158
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Deutsche Literaturkritik

Friedrich Nietzsche believed his own work represented the dawning of a new historical era, and, despite the fact that he lived most of his sane life suffering in obscurity, it is not an exaggeration to say that his vision helped lay the foundations for modernism in style, substance and attitude. Nietzsche was himself devoted to the modern, for he reinterpreted every philosophy, every historical figure and event, every movement that came before him. This reconceptualization of the past through new, modern eyes opened up Nietzsche's thinking to exploring daring possibilities for the future. This prophetic boldness, which is so unique to his style, seduced the modernist generation across the spectrum. He was read by early Zionists as well as by Nazi racial theorists; by Thomas Mann and as well as by Salvador Dali. His influence stretched from psychoanalysis to anarchist politics. Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism traces the effect of Nietzsche's thinking upon a diverse set of problems: from ontology, to politics, to musical and literary aesthetics. The first section of the volume is a series of essays, each exploring a major work of Nietzsche's, explaining its significance while contributing new interpretations of the text. The middle portion connects Nietzsche's thought to the various strands of modernism in which it reveals itself. The final section is a glossary of key terms that Nietzsche uses throughout his works. An excellent resource for any scholar attempting to conceptualize the foundations of modernism or the historical importance of Nietzsche, this volume seeks to outline the philosopher's works and their reception amongst the generations that immediately followed his passing.

Part One

Conceptualizing Nietzsche

1

Nonhuman Transcendence: Art and Non-Anthropocentrism in The Birth of Tragedy

Patricia Valderrama

Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, emerged out of the confluence of several influences and motivations, both personal and intellectual. He pitched it to a potential publisher as a meditation on Wagner, by then the young man’s friend, under the guise of a treatise on Greek culture, by then his official academic field.¹ Although Nietzsche held unconventional views on the purpose and aims of the philological profession, his early and extensive education in classics at Pforta left him with a profound knowledge of and lasting love for ancient European cultures.² It was also at Pforta where Nietzsche first committed to paper—in poetry and prose—the ideas on life, death, and tragedy that he takes up again in The Birth of Tragedy.³

Much like Nietzsche advocated for a study of ancient history tailored to understand his present (AOM, 218), I read The Birth of Tragedy to see what Nietzsche’s views on life, death, and art can do for us in the twenty-first century. I propose it has the most relevance in those moments when the twenty-seven-year-old philosopher casts his eyes up, seeking to transcend the material world, and instead locates aesthetic transcendence within human fleshiness, in the particular materiality of our embodiment that intimately connects us to our nonhuman-animal kin. These connections were just beginning to be understood in the West when the book first was published in 1872. Indeed, Nietzsche’s education in natural and human sciences at Bonn, including Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859, German trans. 1860), encouraged his turn away from Christianity as well as his embrace of Schopenhauer’s philosophy and of Hölderlin’s aesthetics.⁴

These emotional-intellectual shifts that Nietzsche experienced in his student days inform The Birth of Tragedy: in the way it paraphrases Schopenhauer in the fundamental existential question it poses, and in its attempt to salvage the idea of transcendence from Christian theology by bringing it to the realm of art. As the biographer Julian Young explains, “Fritz’s own ‘enlightenment’ during the Pforta years required him to abandon the naïve theological dogma of his upbringing. ... Fritz’s piety became a piety towards art.”⁵ It is precisely the convergence of the existential question and the metaphysical role that Nietzsche claims for art—like Wagner and Schopenhauer before him—that interests me here. The Birth of Tragedy represents Nietzsche’s first sustained effort to develop a “purely artistic” and non-Christian “doctrine” for and on behalf of life, a doctrine that he later calls “Dionysiac” (BT, P, 5). In The Birth of Tragedy, he argues that art makes life worth living, despite all the suffering that living entails, and allows humans to experience momentary transcendence precisely because of its non-anthropocentric, multispecies, and embodied character.

As our species confronts a qualitatively different existential threat in the form of anthropogenic climate change, it behooves us to consider what art can do, beyond mimetic representation, to help us face the challenges the next decades and centuries will surely bring. Reckoning with these challenges involves steeling ourselves against unhappy and inconvenient truths, including the possibility of our own extinction within the next eight decades.⁶ I believe Nietzsche’s insistent and persistent search for the truth, no matter how discomforting the result or the personal consequences, makes him a useful companion in trying to think about art and climate change together.⁷ The Birth of Tragedy in particular lends itself to this sort of thinking because, in it Nietzsche locates the source of art, and therefore transcendence, in animality and the source of existential suffering in individuation.

Nietzsche begins The Birth of Tragedy by identifying the source of art—all art—in nature, rather than in the realm of exclusively human activity. A more-than-human nature channels two agonistic and complementary energies through humans, who Nietzsche conceives of as vessels for nature’s impulses, and the product of this channeling is art.⁸ Famously, these two vital energies are the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Nietzsche defines them early on as “artistic powers which erupt from nature itself, without the mediation of an y human artist, and in which nature’s artistic drives attain their first, immediate satisfaction” (BT, 2). “Artistic pleasure must exist even without human beings,” he insists, considering “the bright flower or the peacock’s tail” analogous to human-made works of art (KSA, 7:7[117]). These early and emphatic claims that art is a wholly non-anthropocentric affair frames his treatment of the Apollonian and, especially, the Dionysian. Rather than viewing humans as the pinnacle achievement of evolution and human culture as the evidence of that status, he evinces a tacit understanding of humans as one kind of being among many, as participants in, rather than dominators of, the more-than-human world he calls nature.⁹

The specific culture that Nietzsche analyzes in The Birth of Tragedy lends itself to non-anthropocentrism. The borders of species-being were arguably more fluid for the ancient Greeks: think of the Sphinx, defined by her cleverness and her interspecies body combining human, lion, and bird; or think of Medusa, the only mortal Gorgon, a woman with wings and a head full of snakes, from whose decapitated body Pegasus emerges, and whose dripping blood generates the coral reef in the sea; or, since these interspecies women were both killed by men, think of Dionysus himself.¹⁰ Accompanied by maenads, sileni, centaurs, and satyrs, Dionysus has the horns of a bull, when he is not transforming into one.

Nevertheless, to describe Nietzsche as a full-throated post-anthropocentric thinker avant la lettre would overstate the case. A product of its time, in The Birth of TragedyNietzsche shows distrust or open contempt for “barbarians” (BT, 2, 4, 15, 18); some non-European societies, especially Eastern ones (BT, 15); the French (BT, 23); would-be revolutionaries threatening social order (BT, 18); sexuality, especially women’s (BT, 2); and “womanish” flights of reason (BT, 11); in all those tropes of Western philosophy built up from the nature/culture binary. One of the earliest depictions of the glory of the Dionysian illuminates the uneven texture of Nietzsche’s non-anthropocentrism. He writes, “Not only is the bond between human beings renewed by the magic of the Dionysiac, but nature, alienated, inimical, or subjugated, celebrates once more her festival of reconciliation with her lost son, humankind.” Nature is personified, not simply linguistically, but in a way that lends the more-than-human world agency and even emotion. For their part, human beings are located on a continuum of life, but according to a European Romantic motif, we remain exceptional for having been “lost.” His philosophy continues to enact this human exceptionalism in reverse, arguing, in Vanessa Lemm’s gloss, that “human life is the weakest and most fragile form of animal life. The vulnerability of the human animal is related to its relative inferiority.”¹¹ In The Birth of Tragedy, he continues, “Freely the earth offers up her gifts, and the beasts of prey from mountain and desert approach in peace. The chariot of Dionysus is laden with flowers and wreaths; beneath its yoke stride panther and tiger” (BT, 1). The Dionysian brings peaceful reconciliation with nonhuman animals, so that humans exist on “a continuum of animal life.”¹² But even after this multispecies reunion has taken place, “panther and tiger” remain in a yoke. Thus, the ontological continuity across species that Nietzsche posits as early as The Birth of Tragedy does not entail ontological equality, either before or after humans have rejoined the more-than-human world through the Dionysian. In sum, the young Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy already espouses the idea of interspecies continuity, but he seems indecisive about the position of human animals on the continuum of animal life.

This vision of the world renewed by Dionysian “magic” already indicates the point where the metaphysical role of art and the existential question converge. Both separately and together, the Apollonian and the Dionysian fulfill specific purposes not just for the more-than-human world that seeks to express them, but for humans, whose experience of the world is characterized by suffering. Nietzsche, going beyond even Schopenhauer, understands existential pain as a structural feature of human life.¹³ The more-than-human world, as the source of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, intervenes at the moment when existence would otherwise be unendurable and provides humans with artistically generative modes to cope with and transcend this existential suffering.

Nietzsche recounts an episode from classical Western mythology to define the cause of existential human suffering while differentiating between the remedies the Apollonian and the Dionysian energies offer. After King Midas captures Silenus, the human-horse companion of Dionysus, the king asks the forest “daemon” “what is the best and most excellent thing for human beings.” Addressing our whole species, Silenus shares his animal wisdom with a laugh: “The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to d ie soon” (BT, 3). The Dionysian and Apollonian each respond to this existential truth in their own way. The Apollonian mediates the “terrors and horrors of existence” distilled in Silenus’s wisdom through dream and illusion. In the plastic arts, for example, “Apollo overcomes the individual’s suffering by his luminous glorification of the eternity of appearance; here beauty gains victory over the suffering inherent in life; in a certain sense, a lie is told which causes pain to disappear from the features of nature” (BT, 16). This is the metaphysical function of Apollonian art: its formal beauty soothes the Greeks in order “to seduce” them “into continuing to live” as if Silenus’s wisdom were not true (BT, 3). Apollonian illusion, then, masks “the eternal, primal pain, the only ground of the world,” but its beauty does not and cannot overcome the Dionysian truth about the pain of existence that Silenus reveals (BT, 4). Thus, in the words of Gilles Deleuze, “Beneath Apollo, Dionysus rumbles.”¹⁴

Nietzsche later elucidates the source and cause of primal pain by restating the dynamic between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in the vocabulary of Schopenhauer, whose philosophy so enamored him at the time. “Apollo stands before me as the transfiguring genius of the principium individuationis, through whom alone release and redemption in semblance can be truly attained,” he explains, “whereas under the mystical, jubilant shout of Dionysus the spell of individuation is broken, and the path to the Mothers of Being, to the innermost core of things, is laid open” (BT, 16). Pairing Silenus’s wisdom with the reformulation of artistic transcendence in terms of the principium individuationis, it seems that it would be best for humans to have never been individuated, materially and biologically. The Birth of Tragedy, unique among the other works in which Nietzsche would take up these same questions, singles out individuation as the origin of ...