Interlude: Nietzsche's World

...connecting the last post with things to come.

This non-theological interlude – my first word on this Substack – is an elaboration on Val’s previous entry, linked here: What's wrong with rock music? - Part II. I recommend reading both parts on that topic first. My only purpose is to fill in the background of thought and vision from which Nietzsche is expounding his ideas on the Dionysian-Apollonian dichotomy.

Nietzsche is, by turns, enthralling and maddening to read – enthralling for the beauty and power of expression and for the fierce bursts of insight and incisiveness, maddening for the frequent inconsistencies and intermittent outrages to which he gives voice. Even if one can sustain the commitment to take no single passage of Nietzsche’s at its word (much less as his final word), parsing his oeuvre can be a challenge.

It is tempting to attribute his contradictions to one cause or another – ranging from the polymathic flexibility of his genius, passing over the often savage irony of his authorial voice, and on to his daunting medical history of “migraine, psychiatric disturbances, cognitive decline with dementia, and stroke” which began (in the first case) in earliest childhood and ended (in the last two) with a definitive collapse at 44 and a lingering death at 55. Yet all this fails to do him justice; we are reckoning with a thinker for whom there are higher things than propositional truth.

Not that he was a fabulist or indifferent to truth; rather, for him, truth dwelt in a delicate balance with beauty, vitality, excellence, and many other values, under the universal rubric of life. This “ja zum Leben,” the Yes to life, was the continual curve on which his thought progressed.

This was, however, a long curve; at first his mind was drawn to philosophy by the work of Artur Schopenhauer, whom the young Nietzsche admired for “his honesty, his joy, and his consistency,” and whose atheism and dark view of the human condition were to remain with him throughout. Yet Nietzsche was not built for the lofty and supercilious resignation Schopenhauer had cobbled together through his appropriations from Buddhism, nor was he equipped with the overweening self-regard which fueled Schopenhauer through life.

Nietzsche’s initial protestations, directed against Schopenhauer’s elevation of Mitleid (pity, generally; often understood as compassion by defenders of Schopenhauer), might make him seem hard-hearted and contemptuous of weakness. Yet to him it is Schopenhauer who is expressing his contempt, by conceding in his unshakable superiority this tiny crack of wan light, between the impregnable fortress of egoism and the bottomless abyss of malice that make up the balance of human motivation. Nietzsche found Mitleid disrespectful to (one’s fellow?) sufferers and enervating to oneself. Already in this was the seed of the commitment to life that led him ultimately to discern and embrace a vital power in suffering.

(Continued after the subscription block)

The Yes to life has yet other dimensions. The commitment to beauty that animates the Birth of Tragedy is another early expression of this Yes. There, he puts forward the Dionysian impulse – consider the Silenus quote that Val cited in the last entry, which could easily have come from Schopenhauer himself. But Nietzsche is not ready to stop there.

To be sure, he favors the Dionysian impulse vis à vis the Apollonian, but would not have either stand alone. His motivation must be noted: he was far more concerned about a culture growing bloodless with moralism, commercialism, idle speculations and empty theories, than with one being overrun with chaos and darkness. This was an arguable position in 19^th Century northern Europe, where German idealism still flourished and Kantian instincts and sensibilities were seeping into the most intellectually engaged Protestant thought. Yet he failed to take seriously enough the toxic currents soon to come and already in motion, which had begun to engulf many in his own circle, above all his once-beloved sister Elisabeth. On that account and on account of his often inherently offensive outbursts of spleen or irony, many have held him complicit in the genesis of the racist-nationalist Nietzsche myth mendaciously concocted by Elisabeth and exploited by Nazi propaganda.

Be that as it may, Nietzsche’s ideal was not the Aryan dream, but the Attic dream, common to irreligionists in Christendom since the Renaissance. His specific version identified the summit in high Greek tragedy, in Aeschylus and, to a lesser degree, Sophocles. Such tragedy balanced the elevated Apollonian voice of the characters, the personae, with the dark Dionysian folk wisdom of the chorus. As much of a music aficionado (and not ungifted composer) as he was, Nietzsche was resolved from his first writings to award the palm to tragedy, rather than to music.

Moreover, his true bête noire in the Birth of Tragedy is neither Apollo nor Dionysus, but Socrates – Socrates the moderate, rational man, the corrupter of youth and enemy of the gods indeed, with his elevation of reason and knowledge over intuition and experience, the harbinger of naturalism through his influence on Euripides and above all others the ancestor of Greek decline, the hinge-point between the Homeric heroes and the Graeculus, the clever, good-natured, self-interested and cowardly house slave of Roman comedy – a figure Nietzsche derides, already in the Birth of Tragedy and at far greater length in the Gay Science. For Nietzsche, Socrates and Euripides together naturalize and rationalize tragic myth into sentimental drama, but it is Socrates, the “first and head Sophist,” the “theoretical optimist,” the “mystagogue of science,” who ultimately degrades Apollo, drives off Dionysus, and topples the highest pinnacle of artistic synthesis in human history.

Is Nietzsche’s assessment fair? Of course not. His Socrates is a lay figure, a symbol of a human and cultural and spiritual tendency which he passionately hated. We will be seeing what exactly aroused this hatred, its connection to Christianity, and what extent to which it is justified or unjustified, in an upcoming post. Suffice it for now to say that there is something greater than Nietzsche at work here.

Meanwhile, if we are to understand anything of Nietzsche at all, of his tortured genius, his frustration and his futility, we must focus on what I consider his central trope – the call to personal excellence. This impulse, magnificent in itself, breaks down under the weight of three nested agendas: first, the idealization of a categorical and solitary greatness, independent of all interpersonal support, totally free of any community or meaningful interaction; second, resentment of any God-figure as a ceiling suppressing that greatness; third, and fatally, the proclamation that this God-figure was being driven forth from the mind of his time – all the while knowing that this being driven forth was due, not to his call to greatness or to any appetite for greatness whatsoever, but to the petty, commercial, and bourgeois mind he hated and despised.

Perhaps Nietzsche ultimately realized that his project was star-crossed; the extreme irony and facetious bravado of his late work (e.g. Ecce Homo) and, even more so, some direct statements found among the more lucid fragments from his 1889 letters during the early stages of his madness seem to testify to this – at least if we are willing to extend some credit to his content, rather than unproblematically reducing everything to the evident physiological degradation of his brain function. From among these, I note how he signs his letters alternately as “Dionysus” and “the crucified,” and opens the longest and most lucid of them, addressed to Jacob Burckhardt, “When it comes right down to it I’d much rather have been a Basel professor than God.”

From all this, I draw two points, going forward: first, the Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy needs to be reworked, especially in the light of Christ – specifically that Christ, that kind of Christ, which the Lutheranism of the North was loath to acknowledge, the Christ of the divine Eros proclaimed most explicitly and authoritatively by Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est; second, the surprising relationship of Christianity to historic religion and philosophy, brought out first by St. Augustine and expanded by Ratzinger in one of the lectures recorded in his Truth and Tolerance. But all of that is for another day.