Although Nietzsche’s 1872 Birth
of Tragedy is admittedly his youthful first major work, it contains a lode
of extremely interesting ideas, many of which I would have liked to comment on.
Rushing this stage of my work into the fastest possible state of completion, I
have no time to do now what I was hoping I could do as my leisurely
intellectual recreation, and therefore I have to relegate my intention to such
time in the future when this wish might come true. The same goes for many other
passages of great interest to me, and so my reader ought to know that the only
reason why there are so many gaping omissions in my commentary on Nietzsches
Werke is purely technical, and this deficiency of completeness will
hopefully be redressed in the future, a very affable future, I might add,
albeit already too much overcrowded with wishfulness...
***
There is an intellectually most
intriguing point, raised in Nietzsche’s latter-day (1886) Preface to his
early work (1872) originally titled The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of
Music. Here is Nietzsche himself who introduces it to us:
“From music? Music and tragedy? The Greeks and
dramatic music? The Greeks and pessimistic art?-- The Greeks: this most
beautiful and accomplished, so thoroughly sane, universally envied species of
man; was it conceivable that they, of all people, should have stood in need of
tragedy; or, indeed, of art? Greek art: how did it function, how could it?
“The question is one of value, the value placed
on existence... Is pessimism inevitably a sign of decadence, warp, weakened
instincts, as it was once with the ancient Hindus, as it is now with us modern
Europeans? Or is there such a thing as a strong pessimism? A penchant of the
mind for what is hard, terrible, evil, in existence, arising from a plethora of
health, plenitude of being? Could it be, perhaps, that the very feeling of
superabundance created its own kind of suffering: a temerity of penetration,
desire for the enemy (the worthy enemy), to prove its strength, to experience
at last what it means to fear something. What meaning did the tragic myth have for
the Greeks during the period of their greatest power and courage? What of the
Dionysian spirit, so tremendous in its implications? What of the tragedy that
grew out of that spirit?”
I am afraid that this question
cannot be meaningfully transferred from nations to individuals. A nation in its
healthy maturity can indeed obey Nietzsche’s heroic scenario. Alas, it is hard
for a mature man to remain in a blissful condition, yet searching for a tragedy
to spice up his life. Tragedy is all around us, initially kept at bay by the
spells of childhood, like Harry Potter’s home was protected from harm,
until he was to reach the fateful age of seventeen. But when tragedy strikes,
our resulting pessimism is no longer that remarkable, as the converse becomes
our principal source of wonderment, namely, how great suffering should produce
an exuberance of optimism? An example of this, in my view, is Nietzsche’s
dancing Zarathustra, borne out of Nietzsche’s pain.
But returning to nations,
who are, after all, not like us, people, who go through the inevitable aging
routine practically since our youngest adulthood, whereas nations, provided
they are both exceptional, and blessed by Destiny, are capable of recurring
rejuvenations in perpetuity, while retaining their maturity throughout this
process. So, here is Nietzsche’s question slightly rephrased:
---Can a great nation in splendid
health produce a certain kind of philosophical pessimism, a disposition
for the tragic? Let us continue with Nietzsche’s argument:
“…Or one might look at it the other way round.
Those agencies which had proved fatal to tragedy: Socratic ethics, dialectics,
the temperance and cheerfulness of the pure scholar;--- couldn’t these, rather
than their opposites, be viewed as symptoms of decline, fatigue, distemper of
instincts caught in dissolution? Or the “Greek serenity” of the later period
as, simply, the glow of a sun about to set? Or the Epicurean animus against
pessimism, merely as the sort of precaution a suffering man might use? And as
for “disinterested inquiry,” so called: what, in the last analysis, did inquiry
come to, when judged as a symptom of the life process? What were we to say of
the end (or, worse, of the beginning) of all inquiry? Might it be that the
“inquiring mind” was simply the human mind terrified by pessimism and trying to
escape from it, a clever bulwark erected against the truth? Something craven
and false, if one wanted to be moral about it? Or, if one preferred to put it
amorally, a dodge? Had this perhaps been your secret, Socrates, most secretive
of ironists, had this been your deepest irony?”
The salvo of Nietzsche’s
fireworks is overwhelming in its resplendence, and each of these individual shells
merits an in-depth investigation. But we should, perhaps, stay with our
particular subject, resisting all these numerous temptations to go astray,
meaning, to deviate from it.
Nietzsche’s intellectual
challenge thrown at us here is, to put it in simplest terms (as I wish
to do it for the purpose of forwarding my own opinion), inviting us to dispute
his contention that out of greatest national health tragedy is born,
whereas out of a declining national health comedy springs.
I love comedy, and in my recent
life I prefer it to tragedy. Remembering myself in my earlier and happier years,
the reverse was true: I loved tragedy and treated comedy as a second-rate
intellectual entertainment. Which is already going a long way toward my
agreement with what Nietzsche is saying, albeit transposed from the national to
personal level. (But then, am I not as an individual a gauge of sorts for the
nation that had reared me?)
The rest of my answer, that is
basically in agreement with Nietzsche’s thesis, is easy to project. The young
males of any healthy nation, even those who are more intellectually disposed,
have a martial spirit (whether hormonally induced, is a medical matter, which
is beside my point, the latter being the statement of the fact itself) burning
in them and directing their minds more towards the heroic rather than the
ridiculous. It’s also true that the heroic is much closer associated with
tragedy (as Nietzsche aphoristically points out in Jenseits 150) than
with comedy, “Socratic ethics, dialectics or the
temperance and cheerfulness of the pure scholar.” When Sparta was
healthy, the heroic was her value, food was a meager necessity, and circus was
outlawed. When however she was on the decline, in the last throes of its agony,
the heroic had by then lost its appeal, bread had increased in value, and
circuses had become a necessity… It’s time to rest my case!
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