Nietzsche's Nook

Edvard Munch, Portrait of Nietzsche, 1906; oil on canvas; Stockholm, Thielska Galleriet.

Last week, I promised that I would expand on Friedrich Nietzsche’s defense of pessimism and disparagement of optimism, which he articulated in his first published work: The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (first published in 1872; referred to hereafter as the BoT). I have been meaning to do so for some time, not simply as an exercise in pedantry, but rather as something of a personal justification. Believe it or not, dear readers, but I have been accused of being a pessimist, an individual possessing an overly gloomy worldview. However, I maintain that I have a positive relationship with my negativity, of which these writings are but one example. Instead of giving in completely to narcissism and launching into a rambling attempt to explain something that is likely of little interest or benefit to the world at large, I felt it would be more enriching if I introduced my readership to some passages in which I find great wisdom and solace, which will also serve to provide insight into my own personal formulations on the necessity of pessimism, as well as how it can even be considered a positive attribute. Additionally, Nietzsche is a philosopher about whom many misconceptions and incorrect generalizations exist. By bringing you into direct contact with a bit of his work (and perhaps more in the future), I hope that you can begin to form your own ideas about a remarkable individual who conceived of himself as an affirmer of life, and whose originality, audacity, remarkable mental agility, and furiously intense writing style should be appreciated, even if, in the end, you do not find his actual philosophies to your liking. Finally, I hope that this brief rundown of Nietzsche’s BoT, in which he articulates his conception of Dionysos and the Dionysian impulse in man, may illuminate past and future writings of mine, which frequently mention this primal god, known most commonly for his association with wine and revelry.

But first, a short introduction to the BoT is in order, for the subject of the passages I will quote is not the primary one treated by Nietzsche in his text, but a foundational assertion. The BoT is a radical re-conception of the ancient Greek world and its legacy to modern civilization. Nietzsche makes the case that the Archaic period in Greece, spanning roughly from 600 BCE until the 480 BCE, is the phase of Hellenic culture that should primarily be valorized as robust, creative, and admirable. This was contrary to common contemporary conceptions, in which the Classical period (480-323 BCE) was considered the golden age of Greek society (and still is to this day, for the most part). Antiquarians and art historians prior to Nietzsche’s day saw in the art and architecture of the Classical Greeks certain characteristics of form – balance, symmetry, order, rationality, and, of course, beauty – the perfection of which had never been equaled before or since. These features manifested themselves particularly in sculpture, such as this one:

Apollo Belvedere; marble; Rome, Musei Vaticani, Cortile del Belevdere. This sculpture portrays the god Apollo just after letting fly an arrow in his battle with the Pythian serpent. While this work is today dated to various periods of the Roman Empire, most influential eighteenth and nineteenth century scholars considered it exemplary of Classical Greek art due to its elegantly beautiful proportions, effortlessly balanced pose, and calm self-possession, even while committing violent action. Additionally, Apollo was the god of medicine, poetry, and light - among other attributes - making him an ideal representative for the values that scholars of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and later periods associated - and continue to associate - with Classical Greek culture.

The characteristics of Classical art were also embodied in the architecture of the period:

Parthenon, 447-438 BCE; Athens, Acropolis. For observers throughout history, the meticulously measured and calculated proportions of this temple have represented the Greeks' rational, ordered approach to all of life's undertakings.

The physical characteristics of Classical Greek art were seen as a reflection of the ancient Greeks themselves: Such sculptures and structures could only have been produced by a people equally as beautiful, poised, and reasonable; and who possessed a harmonious, untroubled accord with the external world. For Nietzsche, however, the Classical period marked the beginning of an epoch of decline that extends to the present day. Nietzsche argues for this shift by asserting that the perfectly serene “cheerfulness” of the Classical Greeks, seemingly apparent in their artistic productions, was not a sign of strength, but of weakness.

Nietzsche complicates the purportedly untroubled existence of the Greeks by asking: If they were so “cheerful,” why did they need art? What purpose would have been served by these creative practices? (Which, he agrees, played a central role in their society.)  Nietzsche’s proposal is that the Greek temperament was inherently pessimistic. According to Nietzsche’s interpretation of ancient Greek culture, based primarily on textual sources (remember, Nietzsche was a professor of classical philology), the early Greeks, prior to the Classical period, saw clearly the brutality and uncertainty of existence. This is evident in the “wisdom of Silenus,” which Nietzsche quotes from a fragmentary Aristotelian dialogue. Silenus, in response to a question asking what is best for man, replies: “The very best thing is utterly beyond [man’s] reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing.”

Since the Greeks knew and experienced the horror of existence so acutely, metaphysical solace was required so that they could motivate themselves to go on living. This was the purpose of Athenian tragedy, which Nietzsche valorizes over sculpture, architecture, and other plastic arts as the most vital form of ancient Greek cultural expression, for the following reason: Tragedy is the perfect fusion of two impulses inherent in man, which the Greeks associated with the dissimilar deities, Apollo and Dionysos. The Dionysian impulse is the earlier and more primal. It is expressed in the imageless art of music and results in an intoxication that breaks down barriers between men and nature. In doing so, the Dionysian impulse exposes the wisdom of Silenus. At this point, the Apollonian drive must construct a world of beautiful images in order to seduce man to continue living. Apollonian art is a saving force that redirects thoughts of the terrible nature of existence into representations with which man can cope. Thus, Attic tragedy was the Apollonian embodiment of Dionysian insights and effects that provided the Greeks with the experience of truth and nature, which they craved, in addition to a consoling representational mechanism that allowed them to survive the experience, which, by itself, was so powerful as to be obliterating. In the Classical period, the primacy of sculpture and architecture indicated to Nietzsche an imbalance toward the Apollonian and a denial of the Dionysian.

Essentially, Nietzsche’s radical proposal was to introduce the Dionysian impulse – with all its attendant connotations of savagery, brutality, and irrationality – into an interpretation of Greek culture, which had previously been imagined as existing exclusively under the sign of Apollo. In fact, despite asserting that tragedy results from a balance of the two forces, Nietzsche privileges the Dionysian: It is “nature,” as opposed to Apollonian “culture,” and hence the earlier, essential foundation upon which the later Apollonian edifice is built.

You have come a long way already, dear reader, and I appreciate your persistence, as I am quite tardy with the promised goods, so to speak. So, without further ado, here you are: some selections from a postscript to the BoT that Nietzsche wrote in 1886, but which was printed as a preface to the original work in all subsequent editions. In this postscript/preface, entitled An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Nietzsche brings to light the questions and the thought processes that led him to treat the larger subject of the book, which I have described above. The emphases throughout the text are his, while the bracketed, un-italicized words are my own attempts to provide context and improve clarity. Enjoy.

While the thunder of the Battle of Wörth rolled across Europe, the brooder and lover of riddles who fathered the book was sitting in some corner of the Alps, utterly preoccupied with his ponderings and riddles and consequently very troubled and untroubled at one and the same time, writing down his thoughts about the Greeks (…). A few weeks later he was (…) still obsessed with the question marks he had placed over the alleged ‘cheerfulness’ of the Greeks; until finally, (…) he too made peace with himself and (…) reached a settled and definitive view in his own mind of the ‘Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music’ – from music? Music and tragedy? Greeks and the music of tragedy? Greeks and the pessimistic work of art? The finest, most beautiful, most envied race of men ever known, the people who made life seem most seductive, the Greeks – what, they of all people needed tragedy? Or even: art? What purpose was served by Greek art?

The reader will have guessed at which point I had placed the great question mark over the value of existence. Is pessimism necessarily a sign of decline, decay, malformation, of tired and debilitated instincts – as (...) appears to be the case amongst us ‘modern men’ and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual preference for the hard, gruesome, malevolent, and problematic aspects of existence which comes from a feeling of well-being, from overflowing health, from an abundance of existence? Is there perhaps such a thing as suffering from superabundance itself? Is there a tempting bravery in the sharpest eye which demands the terrifying as its foe, as a worthy foe against which it can test its strength and from which it intends to learn the meaning of fear? What does the tragic myth mean, particularly amongst the Greeks of the best, strongest, and bravest period? And the monstrous phenomenon of the Dionysian? And tragedy, born from the Dionysian? Conversely, those things which gave rise to the death of tragedy – Socratism in ethics, the dialectics, smugness, and cheerfulness of theoretical man [Note: Have a quick look here for an explanation of Socratism (see the second and third paragraphs after the Böcklin painting).] – might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of exhaustion, of sickness, of the anarchic dissolution of the instincts? And might not the ‘Greek cheerfulness’ of later Hellenism be simply the red flush across the evening sky? Might not the Epicurean will to oppose pessimism be mere prudence on the part of someone who is sick?

(…)

One fundamental question concerns the Greeks’ relationship to pain, the degree of their sensitivity – did this relationship remain constant, or did it become inverted? – the question of whether the Greeks’ ever more powerful demand for beauty, for festivals, entertainments, new cults, really grew from a lack, from deprivation, from melancholy, from pain. [Remember, the prevailing opinion was that Greek culture was beautiful and serene because it was a passive reflection of the Greeks themselves, who were beautiful physically and serene psychologically. Nietzsche suggests the opposite, at least in regard to the psychology of the Greeks.] If one supposes that this was indeed the case (…), what then must have been the source of the opposing demand, which emerged at an earlier point in time, the demand for ugliness, the older Hellenes’ good, severe, will to pessimism, to the tragic myth, to affirm the image of all that is fearsome, wicked, mysterious, annihilating and fateful at the very foundations of existence – where must the origins of tragedy have lain at that time? Perhaps in desire and delight, in strength, in overbrimming health, in an excess of plenitude? In this case what is the meaning (in physiological terms) of that madness – Dionysian madness – from which both the tragic and comic arts emerged? [In ancient Athens, the City Dionysia festival celebrated Dionysos by staging dramatic competitions in which playwrights were required to script and put on four works: a trilogy of tragedies and a comedy, called a satyr play.] Is madness perhaps not necessarily a symptom of degeneration, of decline, of a culture that has gone on too long? Are there perhaps – and this is a question for psychiatrists – neuroses of health, of national youth and youthfulness? What does the synthesis of goat and god in the satyr point to? What experience of their own nature, what impulse compelled the Greeks to think of the Dionysian enthusiast and primal man as a satyr? [This is the demand for ugliness of which Nietzsche spoke, an aspect of Greek culture largely ignored by his predecessors and contemporaries.] And as far as the tragic chorus is concerned – did perhaps endemic fits exist during those centuries when the Greek body was in its prime and the Greek soul brimmed over with life? Were there visions and hallucinations which conveyed themselves to entire communities, entire cultic assemblies? [Here Nietzsche is referring to religious gatherings at which tragedy was performed, such as the City Dionysia, mentioned above.] What? If the Greeks were pessimists and had the will to tragedy precisely when they [as a culture] were surrounded by the riches of youth, if, to quote Plato, it was precisely madness which brought the greatest blessings to Hellas [Phaedrus 244a], and if, on the other hand and conversely, it was precisely during their period of dissolution and weakness [It may be helpful to note here that the Classical period, far from being a time of reason and serenity, was marred by conflicts between Greek city-states, most notably the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, which lasted nearly thirty years (431-404 BCE) and which subsequently crippled the once-powerful nations.] that the Greeks became ever more optimistic, more superficial, more actorly, but also filled with a greater lust for logic and for making the world logical, which is to say both more ‘cheerful’ and more ‘scientific’ – could it then be the case, despite all ‘modern ideas’ and the prejudices of democratic taste, that the victory of optimism, the predominance of reasonableness, practical and theoretical utilitarianism, like its contemporary, democracy, that all this is symptomatic of a decline in strength, of approaching old age, of physiological exhaustion? And that pessimism is precisely not a symptom of these things? Was Epicurus an optimist – precisely because he was suffering?

From Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, translated by Ronald Speirs, in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, edited by Raymond Guess and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 3-8.

I will leave off here, for, though I am tempted to continue on, doing so would bring into play numerous topics – morality, metaphysics, Christianity, Romanticism – that would inflate to gargantuan size an already quite unwieldy blog post. As always, I encourage you to read the work in its entirety. It can be found online here, though the translation is a different one (and, in my view, a slightly inferior one, in terms of rhetorical style, at least).

I would also like to call attention to certain admirable features of Nietzsche’s work, which are illustrated especially well in the passages above. First, he is an audacious contrarian. Nietzsche’s introduction of the Dionysian impulse into his interpretation of Greek culture went against centuries of historical, philosophical, and philological thought. Nietzsche’s ideas are original, creative, and well supported, in addition to the fact that he showed a great amount of professional bravery by publishing a work with such an unorthodox argument and method (and which was widely criticized upon its release). This leads me to another exciting aspect of Nietzsche’s work: His approach to ancient texts and artifacts as living, thinking, feeling entities, rather than inert objects stored away on shelves. Note that Nietzsche pays more attention to the act of performing and viewing tragedy in antiquity than he does to compiling a list of quotes to support whatever point he is trying to make. He is cognizant of the fact that the Greeks would have experienced a play by Aeschylus as a live performance, most likely part of a religious festival, with stage decorations, costumes, and singing, as well as the crowd and its reactions. This is far removed from the manner in which we experience such works today: By taking a book out of the library and reading the text silently, by oneself. Nietzsche’s imagination, creativity, and bravery culminate in an ability to think in a radically holistic manner, which I hope that you have found as scintillating as I do.