Simply Nietzsche, page 3
Wagner, Schopenhauer, and Kant
It isn’t clear quite how this is supposed to work, but maybe, as Aaron Ridley1 suggests, this glimpse into the fundamentally irrational Dionysiac world somehow refreshes the spectator’s own will to live. This brings us to an aspect of Schopenhauer’s philosophy I have yet to mention, an aspect which also brings in Wagner. Music, for Schopenhauer, is our key connection with the essence of the world, and it is for this reason that he considers music to be in a category of its own. Recall that the world in itself—the world beyond the dream-like appearances of representation—is the will. The ebb and flow of the will shows itself, albeit inchoately, in consciousness of our own desire and action, but there is another way in which it can be presented to us. That is through the movement of music, in its crescendo, suspension, and irresolution. Music, Schopenhauer tells us, is a “copy” of the will, and so the most profound of artistic endeavors. A composer of genius does not produce a work that expresses his or own emotions, or something equally, and merely, as transitory; rather, he expresses the very essence of the world. Something like this thought finds its way into BT as well, which is why the Dionysiac is intimately bound to music. Dionysiac choral song is the “essence of nature … bent on expressing itself” (BT 2), and this is why the birth of tragedy is a birth out of the “spirit of music.”
This brings us to Wagner. As one might imagine, Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music made him the darling of composers, and Wagner, like Nietzsche, was an ardent admirer of Schopenhauer. As I mentioned in the Preface, Nietzsche was a close friend of Richard and Cosima Wagner. He was present on Christmas Day 1870 when Richard gifted Cosima with his new composition, “Siegfried Idyll.” Richard’s philosophical views, like those of so many of his contemporaries, concerned the state of culture and society, and the need for its revitalization. He saw everywhere a pernicious fragmentation of the population into disconnected individuals, and the twin threats of consumerism and base hedonism. Something was needed to unify and elevate culture, and for Wagner, that meant a “collective artwork,” or Gesamthkunstwerk, wherein an individual could find meaning and belonging within a united culture. He saw Greek tragedy as the model for a collective artwork. He embraced Schopenhauer’s pessimism, and his view that music’s disclosure of reality somehow provides an answer to pessimism. But, of course, Wagner is no mere theoretician. The inaugural Bayreuth festival of 1876, which Nietzsche helped to plan, expresses nothing short of the ambition to enact his collective artwork. The last movement of the—from section 16 onward—is, in effect, the claim that “rebirth of tragedy” is possible in Wagner’s operas, and that the conditions of German culture make this rebirth ripe. But to appreciate why Nietzsche feels that he can make this claim, we need to look at the second movement of the BT, where he describes the forces behind the fall of the high point of Attic tragedy.
He puts the finger on two culprits, the playwright Euripides and the philosopher Socrates. Euripides, “the thinker, not the poet,” “brought the spectator on the stage” in the sense that his heroes are more realistic and psychologically rich depictions rather than timeless heroic tropes, and that he side-lined the all-important Dionysiac chorus. Behind Euripides’s drift to realism in tragedy is Socrates, whom Nietzsche sees as the personification of unbounded optimism in the power of reason. At the high point of Attic tragedy, there is an insight into and abandonment of a fundamentally irrational world. But it is against this, and indeed a conception of the world as such, that Socrates stood. He lacked entirely any mysticism and had a steadfast will to dispense with appearance. Reason was the route to wisdom and happiness. Euripides’ plays reflect this optimism and so cut tragedy off from its brief disclosure of the fundamental Dionysiac character of existence. Socratism killed drama.
This death of tragedy brings with it the death of the aesthetic justification of existence. Nietzsche and Wagner see the optimism about rationality that killed tragedy as the force behind the decline in culture. One thing I have yet to mention, which is, as we shall see, a recurrent theme in Nietzsche’s thought throughout his career, is the emergence of a post-Christian world. Christianity provided a way of understanding humanity’s place in the cosmos that makes sense of the suffering on this earth and gives meaning to life; but rationality kills. Although Nietzsche doesn’t explicitly mention Christianity in BT, it is nevertheless clear that he believes this conception of the world is no longer tenable, for at least some people at any rate, and he has an abiding concern about how we can fill the vacuum left by the end of this worldview. We shall see much more of this idea as we trace Nietzsche’s intellectual career, but for the moment, we can note that this was a concern for both Nietzsche and Wagner. Part of this decline owes itself to the unbounded optimism of rationality, but there is a twist in the direction of rationality. That twist is German philosophy and particularly the philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer. Thanks to their “enormous courage and wisdom,” German philosophy offers a “victory over the optimism that lies hidden in the nature of logic and which in turn is the hidden foundation of our culture” (BT 18). The Socratic optimism, namely that reason can grasp the world in its entirety, comes up against the Kant-Schopenhauer claim I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. The world we experience is essentially only a form of appearance; logic and causality apply only to that world. This leaves the world itself outside the realm of rational knowledge. For Kant, the limitations of knowledge mean that he could “leave room for faith,” whereas Schopenhauer held that we could at least glimpse the world as the will, and glimpse it as ungoverned by reason. This allows two things. First, if the world is a representation or image, and we can never go beyond it as such, mythical image is no longer seen as illegitimate but something to be celebrated. Second, it leaves room for Nietzsche’s conception of Dionysiac or the “primordial one,” and the hope that Wagner’s “collective artwork” will bring us back in touch with it.
More on the Birth of Tragedy
There is an excited and, dare I say, intoxicated air to the BT, both in its presentation and its grandiose claims. Although, as we saw, Nietzsche was one of the work’s sternest critics, certain themes from BT stayed with Nietzsche for the rest of his sane life. Certainly, he became disillusioned by both Schopenhauer and Wagner, but that is not to say that he rejected wholesale every aspect of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, or that he suddenly developed a strong dislike for Wagner’s music. He fell out from under the spell of Wagner’s personality and saw Wagner’s attempt at cultural regeneration as wrongheaded. The metaphysics of Schopenhauer that makes its way, however inchoately, into the BT is something to which Nietzsche would also develop a strong antipathy. As to the book itself, the 1886 re-titling of The Birth of Tragedy. Or: Hellenism and Pessimism gives us a clue to what Nietzsche took to be important in the work. BT orients itself around pessimism and the Greek response to it. As Nietzsche puts it the new Preface, “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” there remains “a great question mark over the value of existence.” He pondered this question mark continually throughout his career, though not in Schopenhauerian terms. The new Preface also alludes to something he terms the “pessimism of strength,” and this relates to the different way that Nietzsche would conceive pessimism later in his career. Schopenhauer, we saw, believed art constituted a temporary relief from the ceaseless striving of the will, but he also had an ethical philosophy that responded to pessimism. This ethical philosophy was one of self-denial, of ascetic renunciation of life, implying that the moral response to the suffering that is essential to life is to withdraw from life. Nietzsche became increasingly dissatisfied with this response. A pessimism of strength—as opposed to weakness in the face of suffering—is one that doesn’t turn away, or withdraw, from the terrible truths of existence. One should not try to disguise or withdraw from existence, acknowledge suffering, and affirm life. It is this quality that Nietzsche saw in the Greeks. They were fully aware of the horrors of existence but continued to embrace life. They were, as he puts it in the preface to the second edition of TheGay Science, “superficial—Out of profundity!”
As we saw, Nietzsche charged Socratism with the death of tragedy and with contributing to the decline of culture. Socratism is also implicated in the untenability of the moral justification of the world. Reason cannot provide one, and reason also shows the moral justification given by Christianity as untenable. So, if reason cannot provide an answer, what should we do? The BT’s response, as we have seen, is to reject the idea that reason can tell us all, embracing instead the Post-Kantian limitations on science as a route to understanding the world, restore the centrality of myth, and offer the spectacularly outré claim that collective artworks can elicit a momentary dissolution of the appearance of individual and contact with the irrational, primordial, Dionysiac One. Nietzsche quickly abandoned this response but continued thinking about the relation between science, culture, pessimism, and Christianity. After toying with skepticism about truth (which will discuss a little when we come to look at Beyond Good and Evil), Nietzsche became increasingly confident that science is the route to truth. He also rejected the distinction that conditioned the philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer, namely that between the world of appearance—the empirical world—and the world as it is. But his increasing confidence in science as a route to truth should not be confused with the optimistic claim that truth will bring happiness or set us free. For him, there remains a question about the value of truth. Why is truth held in such high estimation? Why do we think we should have truth “at any price?” As we shall see, Nietzsche has some interesting and sometimes surprising things to say about this issue. For the time being, I will merely remark that this concern with the value of truth is linked to a threat related to, but different from, pessimism. This is the threat of nihilism. Pessimism places a value on existence, but a negative value: it is better not to exist than to exist. The terrible truth of nihilism—if it is a truth—is that existence has no value at all. Human beings need values in their lives in order to exist: but what if there is nothing of value at all?
Untimely Meditations
Nietzsche served as a medical orderly during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, spending time at the front. It was a horrifying experience that changed him from someone who believed in the idea of the Prussian state to a skeptic regarding “Fatherlands.” He also began to develop symptoms of the chronic illness that would dog him for the rest of his life. It is not for nothing that Nietzsche was preoccupied with the problem of suffering: he was in frequent states of discomfort, pain, and sickness, which were often crippling and agonizing. As well as physical pain, there was the pain caused by the reception of BT. It was, as we noted, harsh, although members of the Wagner cult unsurprisingly loved the work. Public pamphlets denouncing Nietzsche were circulated, and students discouraged from attending his classes. Exhausted, he excused himself from spending Christmas Day with the Wagners, a perceived slight that would mark the beginning of the end of that intense relationship. Despite his illness and disappointment, Nietzsche took on a considerable writing commitment, promising to deliver at least 13 long essays under the collective title of Untimely Meditations (UT) on diverse topics including education, philosophy and culture, the city, and the Christian disposition. However, the project yielded only four essays.
The first of these, “David Strauss, the Confessor and Writer” (1873), is not one of Nietzsche’s proudest moments. Strauss, a German theologian, had also written a work to demystify Jesus. Entitled The Life of Jesus (1835/6), it left a considerable impression on the young Nietzsche, contributing to his loss of faith. Strauss’s later work, however, The Old Faith and the New (1872), was deeply disliked by Wagner, and it is barely an exaggeration to say that a significant motivation in Nietzsche’s attack on Strauss in this first Untimely Meditation was to please Wagner. Nietzsche tore into Strauss’s style with such invective that he soon regretted the attack. When Strauss died soon after Nietzsche’s essay was published, Nietzsche wrote in a letter that he hoped he “did not make his [Strauss’s] last days more difficult and that he died without knowing anything of me.” Beneath the invective, however, Nietzsche’s concern about culture, similar to the one we noted in BT, and one which reflects his disillusionment with Prussian nationalism, underlies the first of the Untimely Meditations. The victory over France seemed to many a demonstration of Prussian superiority, but Nietzsche saw this as nothing but jingoism, in contrast to the genuine culture that the Bayreuth Festival promised to bring. Nietzsche still held out hopes for the rebirth of a culturally redemptive art.
The Bayreuth Festival project, however, was not going as well as was hoped, and financial backing was scarce. Wagner asked Nietzsche to write a manifesto for the project, which Nietzsche did, only to see the sponsorship committee choose a declaration by another author. At the same time, he had been working on the second Untimely Meditations, “Of the uses and disadvantages of history for life,” which was published in 1874. Again, the topic of this essay is a concern he shared with Wagner, namely the value of historical knowledge, and relatedly, the valuable forms of history? Nietzsche distinguishes among three kinds of history—“monumental,” “antiquarian,” and “critical.” The “fundamental idea of the faith in humanity” (UT, p. 68) finds its expression in monumental history, which represents exemplars of human greatness. Its value to us is that one can learn “from it that the greatness that once existed was in any event once possible, and may thus be possible again” (UT, p.69). But simple and uncritical veneration has its dangers, and so requires tempering. The antiquarian historians focus not on the great but wish to represent everything of the past. In doing so, they can correct a tendency to turn historical representations into outright false idols by those intent on stifling the great of the modern age (Wagner, perhaps?). Unchecked, monumental history is a “masquerade costume in which their hatred of the great and powerful of their own age is disguised as satiated admiration for the great and the powerful of past ages” (UT, p.69). But antiquarian history is nevertheless “mummification” of the past, focused on the preservation rather than change. What is required is critical history, one concerned with neither mere preservation nor myth-making, but with a judgmental approach to the past. Properly conducted, history is “art,” because it should adopt an expressively selective and evaluative stance to the past in order to contribute to the health of our present culture.
The second Untimely Meditation also contains the beginnings of Nietzsche’s critical reflections on the notion of objectivity, about which I will make a few remarks, but discuss in a little more depth later in this book. To be objective, one might think, would be to put aside one’s own values, interests, and prejudices, simply recording “what really happened,” aiming to “mirror” the past. Aside from pointing out that historians deceive themselves in thinking that they do this, the very idea of approaching the past without values and interests is incoherent. To ask questions about what happened in the past, one should have some sense of what is significant to ask of it, and that itself is going to depend on one’s values or interests. Determining an answer to, and even formulating the question as to “what really happened,” will depend on whether one is interested in a political narrative, the position of women in some given age, the development of some sports team, or another aspect of history. The idea of determining “what really happened” independently of values and concerns doesn’t make sense. This is not to say that the world does not constrain the answers to the questions in terms of facts. But without interests and values, no questions about the past could ever be formulated correctly.
The two remaining Untimely Meditations, “Schopenhauer as Educator” and “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” mark the end of Nietzsche’s “early period.” His notebooks during that time are revealing in this regard. First, philosophically speaking, there are signs of the ideas Nietzsche would later develop and the style in which he would present them. Second, from 1874 on, critical thoughts about Wagner first emerged. “Schopenhauer as Educator,” it is often correctly observed, is surprising because Schopenhauer’s central philosophy, as expressed in World and Will and Representation, is all but absent from the essay. Nietzsche, as I mentioned, abandoned Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, never to return to it. So what is the essay about? As the title suggests, it is about Schopenhauer as an educator, but not in the sense of his being a professor, nor, indeed, his particular doctrines, but as an example of someone able to set himself apart from prevailing cultural tides. The monumental history of the second Untimely Meditations also focuses on exemplars, and Schopenhauer educates by being an exemplar. Nietzsche admires Schopenhauer’s distaste for university professors—not unsurprisingly, given Nietzsche’s own disillusionment with his life in academia, as well as the fact that Schopenhauer’s thought is dead set against the dominant philosophy of Hegel. But the exemplar that is Schopenhauer (which is, to a large extent, only Nietzsche’s vision of him) makes a broader point, namely that culture requires great individuals—philosophers, artists, and saints—to enrich it.
There are many aspects of this general idea that I shall briefly note now, reserving a more detailed discussion for later in this book. First, there is the now-familiar refrain that modern culture suffers from “spiritlessness” and that “all moral energy … is at a low ebb” (UT, p.132), the causes of which Nietzsche admits are complicated, but, nevertheless, he singles out one—the oscillation between the ideals of Christianity and classical culture. Although Christian ideals have become unsustainable, their influence runs deep, precluding a simple return to the morality of the Greeks. Second, he thinks such cultural conditions are not conducive to the production of the great individuals capable of revitalizing life. It is here that the illiberal side of Nietzsche is pronounced. “Mankind must work continually at production of individual great men—that and nothing else is its task” (UT, p.161) he writes, and immediately responds to what he rightly anticipates as incredulity by posing a question to the individual reader:
