Pessimism and its Overcoming in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy

Introduction

Is pessimism necessarily a sign of decline, decay, degeneration, weary and weak instincts–as it once was in India and now is, to all appearances, among us, “modern” men and Europeans?

Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual predilection for the hard, gruesome, evil, problematic aspect of existence, prompted by well-being, by overflowing health, by the fullness of existence?

This is a quote from the later-written preface to The Birth of Tragedy, the first book written by the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, at the young age of 28. Nietzsche asks this question because in his book, he wonders if it is possible to have a “pessimism of strength”, a perspective which accepts that life is full of suffering, but instead of considering this suffering as justifying a rejection of life, instead welcomes this suffering as a way to further greatness in life! In short, a pessimism that welcomes a greater life, and not the rejection of life.

Nietzsche believed that the ancient Greeks, as demonstrated in their literature written before the coming of rational, intellectual philosophers like Socrates and Plato, embodied this very pessimism of strength.

But in this essay, I will argue that we should not be fooled by Nietzsche’s extensive discussion of Greek literature in The Birth of Tragedy: his writings remain directed not towards the past, but directly towards us, modern people – the modern people who, living in the absence of God, face the challenge of pessimism. In Nietzsche’s first, short book lies the key to his entire project, for which he would devote his later texts: the project of finding a new meaning of life for those who inhabit the pessimistic, godless modern world.

The Influence of Wagner and Schopenhauer

At the time when he wrote The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche’s mind was taken over by two crucial influences, or philosophical fathers, both of whom he would later reject.

The first was the composer Richard Wagner – thirty years older than the then-unknown Nietzsche, the famous composer was intrigued by the thoughts of the young philologist on music and the meaning of life. Here, it’s relevant to know that the full title of Nietzsche’s essay is, in fact, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, which foreshadows the importance of music in understanding this essay.

Nietzsche, of course, is known to have enjoyed playing the piano. Opinions on his musical skill are quite divided – nonetheless, he believed that music played an important role in the justification of life. Indeed, he is often quoted as having said:

            “Without music, life would be a mistake.”

Nietzsche’s second influence at the time was the famous German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. While Schopenhauer had never met Nietzsche, and had passed away over a decade before the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche read Schopenhauer’s most important work, The World as Will and Representation, in 1865, 7 years before The Birth of Tragedy was published. His reading of Schopenhauer profoundly influenced his early philosophical development.

Now, this is not the place to do a deep-dive into Schopenhauer’s philosophy, but for our purposes, it is important to remember that Schopenhauer is believed to be the founder of modern philosophical pessimism. By his pessimism, Schopenhauer meant that life did not just have no meaning, but actually had a negative value – it would be better never to have been born, than to have to exist in this “cruel, malevolent world”. This is because, according to Schopenhauer, the world we see around us is the outcome of a single entity, the ‘Will’, which only seeks to survive and reproduce itself at all costs. The world, therefore, is a meaningless expansion of the Will, and, despite our lives being full of suffering, the Will keeps us going because it lives, almost like a parasite, through us.

The solution to life, then, becomes to escape it: through what Schopenhauer calls “the self-denial of the Will”. The greatest of humans are those who can go beyond the Will, who can pierce through the veil of maya – the Sanskrit word which can mean “illusion”, among other things - which holds us all under its control.

But who are these great beings? Schopenhauer believed that there were two avenues for the denial of the Will: art and asceticism. For great ascetics - religious visionaries like the Buddha and Jesus, and the monks who became their followers - the Will that creates all existence is rejected through self-denial: through fasting, prayer, and compassion for others.

These qualities help the ascetic get rid of the ego within them, and this, in turn, helps them deny the Will-to-life, which in other individuals, results in the powerful drives to “succeed” in the material and sensual sphere, and ultimately, to produce one’s own children, thus only perpetuating the madness of the Will for another generation.

But the other way of denying the Will – art – is more relevant to the project of The Birth of Tragedy. Schopenhauer believed that in the greatest of art, particularly in music, the individual enters a realm where the Will is transcended, and thus, denied. This is because when we are taken over by a great work of art, our ego dies, at least temporarily.

We cease to identify with our own limited selves and identify with all of humanity. Music enables us to enter this transcendental experience where, just like the great ascetic, we can look behind the veil of maya (which is none other than our own ego) and see the Will for what it really is: a cruel, malevolent force which inhabits all of nature and drives it towards perpetuating itself, in spite of all rational sense.

The reason why I have discussed Schopenhauer at such length is because Wagner himself was profoundly taken over by Schopenhauer’s ideas, and strove to make his music based on Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Hence, Wagner and Schopenhauer were crucial to Nietzsche’s ideas on the two things he is most concerned with in The Birth of Tragedy: art and pessimism. This helps us understand how, despite being deeply influenced by Schopenhauer’s theories of music and pessimism, Nietzsche actually turns Schopenhauer’s philosophy on its head in his discussion of the “pessimism of strength.”

Introduction to The Birth of Tragedy

The Birth of Tragedy is largely an essay analyzing ancient Greek tragedy and poetics, which would seem to be of little relevance to a contemporary reader of philosophy. However, in between extensive discussions of Greek writers like Euripides, Sophocles and Homer, burst out, as if from an uncontrollable passion, sparks of deep wisdom, foreshadowing the phenomenon of Nietzsche himself as the self-described “Socrates who plays music,” that would emerge within a decade of this book.

A “Socrates who plays music” …what does that even mean? I’ll come back to this in some time, when it will make a lot more sense. But first, let’s discuss the essential themes of The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche’s central concern in this essay is the contradiction which he believed to be inherent in Greek art: the celebration of the heroic grandeur of gods and warriors on the one hand, and a pessimistic rejection of existence on the other.

Both of these attitudes can be witnessed in the great works of ancient Greek literature. For the celebration of victory and valor, we can take the example of Homer’s Iliad, possibly the most famous text of Western antiquity. Here, we have warriors fighting in the Trojan war, inflicting immense cruelty upon each other, but this cruelty is never shamed or denigrated in any way – instead, the cruel drive towards victory among the warriors is celebrated and considered healthy. War and bloodshed are considered as demonstrating the courage and prowess of the warrior – the savage cruelty of such a life does not become grounds for rejecting existence, as with the pessimist, but this cruelty is affirmed by the ancient Greeks.

On the other hand, we have the phenomenon of pessimistic tragedies in ancient Greek literature and mythology: for example, Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. This pessimistic strand in ancient Greek culture is also exemplified in the figure of Silenus, who is a companion and tutor of the Greek god of wine, Dionysus (to whom we will come very soon). When compelled to speak in one of these myths, though, Silenus reveals a profoundly pessimistic truth:

"What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be: to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon."

This reminds us of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, where the world is to be rejected because of its suffering. But crucially, unlike Schopenhauer, the pessimism of Silenus exists alongside the celebration of life and its cruelty in Homer’s epics. This made Nietzsche wonder: how could both of these attitudes coexist, in such harmony, within the same society?

He reconciled this by positing two basic forces that underlie art: the Apollonian and the Dionysian, derived from the Greek gods, Apollo and Dionysus. Much has been written about this distinction created by Nietzsche, yet to me his definition of them seems fairly straightforward. In simple terms, the Apollonian is the instinct of rationality: of order, form, and intellect. The Apollonian drive is predominant in scientific, rational cultures: cultures of the mind and not the heart. The Dionysian, instead, as its relation to the Greek god of wine implies, is a drive towards chaos. The Dionysian represents the primal, ecstatic, and suffering aspects of existence, often associated with music and intoxication.

Nietzsche defines both of these forces, at least at first, in Schopenhauerian terms: while the Apollonian is the struggle for individuation (or in Schopenhauer’s pretentious language, “the principium individuationis (individuating principle) of the will”), the Dionysian is a chaotic passion for rejecting this individuation, and to subsume one’s own individuality into the universal will-in-itself - to get lost in nonduality, to kill the individual ego. Nietzsche writes: in the Dionysian…man is incited to the greatest exaltation of all his symbolic faculties; something never before experienced struggles for utterance–the annihilation of the veil of maya, oneness as the soul of the race and of nature itself.…Apollo, however, again appears to us as the…principium individuationis, in which alone is consummated the perpetually attained goal of the primal unity, its redemption through mere appearance.

Here, we should note that while Nietzsche describes the Apollonian as the unitive, or ‘organizing’ aspect of existence, as opposed to the chaos of the Dionysian, it is actually the Dionysian mode where one reaches a transcendental oneness that tears apart the veil of maya. Ultimately, it is necessary to incorporate the Dionysian in a healthy dose, and the lack of the Dionysian in later rational cultures (as exemplified by philosophers like Socrates) is what leads to their weakness, and even, ultimately, their weak pessimism, which must reject life instead of embracing it.

Music and the Will: Schopenhauer Rejected

Given that Nietzsche relies extensively on Schopenhauer’s terminology in this text, it should not be thought that The Birth of Tragedy is fundamentally a Schopenhauerian analysis of tragedy. This is because Nietzsche’s break with Schopenhauer has already begun here, in his (admittedly subtle) rejection of pessimism. In one of the best (and unfortunately brief) passages of this short essay, he writes, against the aesthetic theory of Schopenhauer where art is used for a “denial” of the Will:…the subject, the willing individual that furthers his own egoistic ends, can be conceived of only as the antagonist, not as the origin of art. Insofar as the subject is the artist, however, he has already been released from his individual will, and has become, as it were, the medium through which the one truly existent subject celebrates his release in appearance…it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified. Hence, life becomes meaningful only because we have the aesthetic manner of tragedy, which we can use to represent our (true, inner) existence – instead of opting for pessimistic philosophy, mere reflections on the consciousness of our mortal chains, we can celebrate existence by aestheticizing it into the tragedy that it is. This allows the will to appreciate and even celebrate itself as representation, in the Apollonian joy of individuation in appearance, but also in the simultaneous, countervailing Dionysian intoxication which cuts asunder the veil of maya.

The crucial point here is that art, instead of becoming the path to the denial of the Will (as Schopenhauer maintained), now becomes the means for the highest affirmation of the Will, and thus, of all existence – life is affirmed in viewing it as an artistic phenomenon. Nietzsche writes: here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity. Hence, the genres of horror and comedy must both play an equal role in overcoming the suffering of existence: horror, or ‘the sublime’, by artistically taming – representing in an artistic form – the true horror, which is our existence; and the comic, in turn, helps us get rid of the “nausea of absurdity”, by laughing away the absurdity of the world. Both the Apollonian and the Dionysian combine in art to save the human from inaction, from the rejection of the world – art elevates suffering into the aesthetic, and hence affirms all of existence.

The Artist and the Veil of Maya

We also find in this book a very interesting discussion of Socrates as the “theoretical optimist” who eventually brings about the end of Greek tragedy because of his belief in truth as good, and error as evil – the position of the intellectual, purely Apollonian being.

But then, a call for a “new Socratism” is issued by Nietzsche: a Socratism that can “embrace music”, and hence the Dionysian aspect of existence, instead of shunning the Dionysian from all existence in favor of Apollonian rationality. Nietzsche thus anticipates his own future self: the artistic Socrates we brought up earlier, which is the true synthesis of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. He writes as follows: we might, therefore, just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will; and this is the reason why music makes every painting, and indeed every scene of real life and of the world, at once appear with higher significance, certainly all the more, in proportion as its melody is analogous to the inner spirit of the given phenomenon…it is only through the spirit of music that we can understand the joy involved in the annihilation of the individual…[here] we see clearly the phenomenon of Dionysian art, which gives expression to the will in its omnipotence…the eternal life beyond all phenomena, and despite all annihilation…Dionysian art, too, wishes to convince us of the eternal joy of existence: only we are to seek this joy not in phenomena, but behind them.

There is so much more to discuss here. Nietzsche really fits in a truck-load of exciting, but brief, ideas, each of which may deserve an essay of its own. Interestingly, in a passage, he discusses 3 types of cultures: the Alexandrian, the Hellenic, and the Buddhistic. The modern world, for him, is Alexandrian: the culture famous only for its extensive library (the library of Alexandria) but not for its original contributions. Just like that, the modern world collects knowledge about the past and its achievements, but has little to show in the name of contemporary artistic insight. This he calls the Socratic love of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

I conclude with a quotation about Nietzsche’s discussion of culture:

It is an eternal phenomenon: the insatiable will always finds a way to detain its creatures in life and compel them to live on, by means of an illusion spread over things. One is chained by the Socratic love of knowledge and the delusion of being able thereby to heal the eternal wound of existence; another is ensnared by art’s seductive veil of beauty fluttering before his eyes; still another by the metaphysical comfort that beneath the whirl of phenomena eternal life flows on indestructibly…

These three stages of illusion are actually designed only for the more nobly formed natures, who actually feel profoundly the weight and burden of existence, and must be deluded by exquisite stimulants into forgetfulness of their displeasure. All that we call culture is made up of these stimulants…

Anmol Kohli is a Research Scholar at the Centre for Philosophy, Jawaharlal Nehru University