THE JOYS OF TRAGEDY: NIETZSCHEAN METAPHYSICS TOWARD A THEORY OF ETHICS

       In order to effectively redeem The Birth of Tragedy, we first need to understand that it is indeed flawed, and what exactly it is that plagues it. While containing much brilliance, the book has its fair share of shortcomings. For one, it is Nietzsche’s first book and yet he speaks as if he has built up decades-worth of rapport with his readers such that he doesn’t need to explain certain concepts or terms. This amounts to a vernacular seemingly native only to Nietzsche’s mind. Ideas such as the Dionysian and the Primordial One are critical to his account and yet in all the excitement he never slows down and gives them the thorough explanation that they demand. Instead, we are left to piece together what exactly they mean throughout the course of the work. Furthermore, Nietzsche never provides a proper justification for why tragedy is so valuable in art and in our lives. He relies on the force of his personality, the excitement with which he speaks, to convince us of these things. He speaks the language of intuition and feeling at the expense of reason, the true language of the philosopher. This amounts to an account that convinces only the believers, those who need no convincing. People who already agree with the sentiments shared here in The Birth of Tragedy will find truth in the work, but for those who haven’t yet found these truths in their own experience this likely will not suffice. But who better to hear all of this from than Nietzsche himself?

       This last bit is extremely relevant to the point that I am making: “dispensing with evidence, even distrustful of the relevance of evidence, like a book for the initiated…” Nietzsche treats the reader as if he already knows what he is talking about and consequently neglects definitions, explanations, and justifications to a significant degree. Rather than back up his statements, he tries to instill their truth through his exuberance and the hope that we identify, in our own experience, with the sentiment of what he is saying. And even in this hope of identification he doesn’t directly appeal to us to search through our experience to find value in tragedy, nor does he instruct us on any means by which we might do so. Instead, he merely speaks on the experience of tragedy through his eyes and works in which one might find beauty in the tragic, such as Tristan and Isolde. In the present state of man (though perhaps it was otherwise in some ancient state), it is not natural to come to consciously recognize the beauty in tragedy in real life unless one is shown how, a task which Nietzsche ignores. Though Nietzsche’s self-criticism is rather scathing, he makes clear that there are important ideas contained within The Birth of Tragedy “which all lay close to the threshold of something communicable.” ³ I agree, and the remainder of this paper is dedicated to moving these ideas beyond this threshold and into the light.

       Nietzsche’s defense of tragedy arises as a response to the Aristotelian treatment of the cathartic emotions and the emotional experience found in tragedy. Aristotle sees the cathartic experience, the unleashing of strong negative emotions (namely pity and fear, in the Greek tradition) via the visceral experience thereof, as a mere means to a greater end. Catharsis serves to purge man of these negative emotions such that he develops into a better person beyond the context of the tragedy. Thus, per Aristotle, cathartic experiences this analysis of the tragic. He finds tragedy, both in art and in life, valuable in its own right. We enjoy tragedy, he says, because we revel in the suffering itself, not merely the effects which it has a tendency to produce. But how could this be so? Most people when confronted with the question “Do you love your own suffering?” would curtly reply in the negative. Understanding this requires a shift in one’s paradigm of thought. To better understand it in Nietzsche’s terms, we must first come to comprehend a concept which he so often discusses in The Birth of Tragedy, “the Dionysian.” The definition isn’t as easy to extract from the text as one might hope. It is never given a complete, concise definition, and is only defined to a minimal extent in a few places. When he first introduces the term, he calls it “the non-visual art of music, the Dionysian.” ⁴ In "An Attempt at Self-Criticism" he alternately says it is marked by “the desire for the ugly,” “madness,” and a “way of evaluating life, something purely artistic.” ⁵

Elsewhere it is exemplified and referenced numerously, and through these we may understand the concept more fully. We find that it is encountered through singing and dancing and partaking in rituals. We thus know that the Dionysian has much to do with music, but how so, exactly? Speaking of the man who creates such art, Nietzsche gives us further insight in the following passage: “He has, first of all, as a Dionysian artist, become entirely unified with the primordial oneness, with its pain and contradiction, and produces the reflection of this primordial oneness as music, if music can with justice be called a re-working of the world and its second casting.” ⁶ Here we are introduced to the concept of primordial oneness, elsewhere called the Primordial One or primordial unity, an integral aspect of Nietzsche’s account of the Dionysian, which we may encounter through music. The primordial oneness describes a metaphysical reality: that everything in existence, beyond all the appearances, concepts, and illusions (the Apollonian), exists as one. There is no true distinction between one thing or another, only the illusion of such perpetuated by the egoistic self. In daily life we live under the illusion of the self, make islands of ourselves despite the deeper nature of reality, that we are all one. Music is inspired by this truth and thus expresses it, giving us the opportunity to feel it for ourselves. The Dionysian, then, involves an arrival at the visceral understanding that we are a part of the primordial oneness, and a tearing down of the illusion that reality is otherwise. Nietzsche describes this experience as it takes place through art:

       The Dionysian is a concept that refers to the affirmation of everything in life, even the ugliness, destruction, and suffering, and all that which might help us in attaining this perspective. It is thus that we may find the value inherent in tragedy. Tragic art leads us to this joy by forcing an encounter with the primordial oneness. Such is Nietzsche’s account of the tragic. Though I have clarified and condensed the relevant ideas from Nietzsche’s account of tragedy, it still leaves something to be desired. He still lacks justifications and makes leaps that are difficult to follow. Critical questions have yet to be answered before this theory can be made whole. How does one come to embrace the Dionysian? How might one find joy in the primordial oneness? And can this process teach us to find joy even in the tragedies of life? We now turn to the task of answering these questions.

       In order to complete this account of tragedy, I am going to employ the concepts that Nietzsche has already laid out for us. They adequately capture the ideas that a justification of the tragic must be founded upon; they simply need further explanation and justification beyond what Nietzsche offered in The Birth of Tragedy. It begins with the metaphysical concept of primordial oneness. From a substance monist perspective, the universe is a single chaotic mass of swirling, ever-changing particles. Consciousness is an evolutionarily advantageous illusion that convinces us that we are separate from the rest of it all. Through consciousness we have built language, which allows us to label not only ourselves as distinct entities, but all other aspects of existence as well. Everything is separated from everything else, and thus from itself. Yet we have the capacity to see beyond this illusion into the nature of things as they “truly” are. For the man united with the primordial oneness, there is nothing truly bad or evil to be rejected by man, because everything is himself and he is a part of everything. It is only through the illusion of separation that we come to formulate these concepts. The Dionysian is the recognition and celebration of this truth through various means, such as tragic art. Part of the difficulty in trying to articulate this truth is that it rejects the validity of language as a lens through which to see the world objectively. It exists in a place beyond words, words being arbitrary, thus making it impossible for them to capture the ultimate truth of the matter. All words can do is point. Music illustrates this idea perhaps better than any medium, because it conjures up a realm beyond the linguistic. Music expresses, and consequently induces in us, the whole gamut of emotions. Through music we feel ecstasy, fear, comfort, sadness, pity, loneliness, and more. And yet, we do not see the so-called “negative” states among these as something to flee from. This is because we are partaking in the Dionysian and are brought out of ourselves into something beyond. We are experiencing the primordial oneness, whereupon we recognize, viscerally rather than consciously, that it is all beauty. Nietzsche remarks that by the power of music, “Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community.” ⁹ Music is not the sole art form by which we might experience the Dionysian, though, and it would serve us well to look at some other media through which the tragic might be expressed.

       Narrative forms of art (while music can assume a narrative form, it is less strictly so than others) provide examples of the tragic and the Dionysian which are more analogous to the structure of our own lives than is music, and as such might help us to better understand the value of tragedy in our own lives. Nietzsche wrote in The Birth of Tragedy about Richard Wagner’s opera, Tristan and Isolde. The modern-day reader might better relate to the media of literature and film, both of which contain rich and expansive narrative traditions. In these we witness the same workings of the Dionysian as we do in music. The audience is swept up into the art and undergoes a deindividuation whereby they lose their sense of self. The oft-referred-to acts of being lost in a book or entranced by a film illustrate this occurrence. With their sense of self diffused, there is nothing restraining the audience from encountering the primordial oneness of which Nietzsche speaks and saying “Yes” to all that it entails. These narratives then cause the audience to revel in the emotions they evoke, no matter sorrowful or joyful, so long as they are deeply felt. Nietzsche speaks on the experience of the viewer of a narrative tragedy: