Fredrich Nietzsche is one of the most despised philosophers in European philosophical discourse because of his vicious intellectual attack on European religion and morality. What was Nietzsche’s tragedy? — it was the crudeness that ensued in Europe due to the Franco-Prussian war and the battles that were being waged in the European continent in the name of pride. For Nietzsche, the war was aimed at self-assertion and a redemption of pride which eventually led him to invent his grand secular myth with tragedy.
Nietzsche drew his great tragedy from Greek art and music, particularly from the Greek pessimism that marched the Greek civilization towards decadence. Nietzsche’s basic question was: is this pessimism a sign of decadence or of warp and weakened instincts, as it once was with the ancient Hindus? From this position, Nietzsche profoundly attacked the ideals of Christianity. His work was psychologically as deep as Freud, but he used a different kind of vocabulary including Ecce Homo, that had a frequent interaction with Id, ego and super-ego. However, he never received the kind of credit for his work that the forerunner of psychoanalysis, Freud, did.
He published his famous work ‘The birth of tragedy’ in 1872, in which he defined the tragedy of ancient Greeks through the eyes of demi-gods: Apollo and Dionysus. What Nietzsche believed, was that the degeneration of Socratic ethics in ancient Greece became the first symptom of their decline — what he called the rise of pessimism. For Nietzsche, it was the Inquiry mind or the mind that is terrified by pessimism and trying to escape from it, which has erected a clever bulwark against the truth, and created what he called illusions. Indeed, Nietzsche is the first philosopher in history who led a scholarly investigation regarding Greeks; his book digs deep into Greek art and music through analytical and retrospective discourse.
What we know best about the Greeks are their ideals of love for beauty, their love for ceremonies, their love for art and music, and more than that, their love for philosophy; but the irony about them was their pessimism, which was doctrinal. Both Thucydides and Pericles have superficially expressed their faith in Greek pessimism. But Nietzsche explained this irony through Dionysiac spirit, showing that it reflects Greek commitment to the tragic myths, whose depiction is wholly awful, evil, perplexing and destructive for human existence. Physiologically, it was the Dionysiac frenzy that gave rise to tragedy and in turn the attitude of the Greek towards pain. According to Nietzsche, it was only the period of dissolution and weakness that turned the Greeks towards optimism and frivolity and they suddenly become mad for logic and rationality, which they, in turn, outgrew once they became gayer and more scientific.
Fredrich Nietzsche is one of the most despised philosophers in European philosophical discourse because of his vicious intellectual attack on European religion and morality. What was Nietzsche’s tragedy?
On the other hand, Nietzsche’s friendship with Richard Wagner is also worth-mentioning, because he was greatly inspired by Wagnerian art and music. In the Wagnerian context, Nietzsche believed that it was art rather than ethics that makes the metaphysical activity of man — purely in aesthetic sense. Let’s take this connotation in the domain of divinity, in which he called the believers the biggest tragedy-makers. Nietzsche believed the world was made to appear, at every instant, a successful solution to God’s own tensions through ever-new visions projected by the great sufferers, for whom illusions were the only way of redemption.
With this proposition he attacked both western morality and religion. He argued that Christianity as a whole was made to loathe itself in the first place, and then was tricked out with the notion of a better life and that the whole Christian assertion consisted of nothing except moral values which were based on fallacious facts and illusions.
Therefore, for Nietzsche, morality that denies life is a secret instinct of destruction that is a supreme danger to our existence. This was the notion that turned Nietzsche against the Christian defamation of life and forced him to develop a counter doctrine slanted esthetically. In this way, Nietzsche has given birth to a tragedy and by embracing his tragedy he became anti-Christ and followed the path of Greek God Dionysus. Moreover, with this tragedy Nietzsche marked himself as the only philosopher with a complete divorce from religion in contemporary history.
The author is a postgrad with interest in history and current affairs. He can be reached on Twitter @rahimabbas3
Published in Daily Times, November 23rd 2018.