[Pubished in J. Lippitt (ed.): Nietzsche’s Futures (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 129 – 148]

“A ‘Pessimism of Strength’: Nietzsche and the Tragic Sublime”

Jim Urpeth University of Greenwich

I have the right to understand myself as the first tragic philosopher - ...the extremest antithesis and antipodes of a pessimistic philosopher

(EH, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, sect. 3)

In considering Nietzsche’s thought in relation to the theme of the ‘future of the

human’ the topic of the overcoming of pessimism through art is particularly

important. Nietzsche’s discussion of this issue concerns the affirmation of a tragic

sublime that discloses the limits of the ‘human’.

I

Although Nietzsche was more sympathetic to philosophical pessimism than optimism

he offered a relentless critique of it. For Nietzsche, pessimism - as merely the

opposite of optimism - does not develop a transvaluative critique of metaphysical

values. The disagreement between optimism and pessimism concerns merely the

extent to which human beings are judged capable of attaining the ideals of the

Platonic-Christian tradition in the secular guise of modern humanism. Hence both

optimism and pessimism presuppose a negative evaluation of ‘this world’ (i.e., the

body, the senses, becoming, etc.).

Pessimism, no less than optimism, underscores the values that are, in Nietzsche’s

view, the origin of the dichotomy that underpins the dualist ontology of modern

humanism, namely the ‘man/nature’ opposition. Modern humanism inherits

uncritically from the Platonic-Christian tradition a commitment to the ‘ascetic ideal’

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in so far as it thematises the ‘human’ in idealist terms founded upon the renunciation

of instinct. Such complicity with theologico-humanist values is the source of

Nietzsche’s condemnation of pessimism which, he argues, remains in this way under

the shadow of the ideals of Platonic-Christian metaphysics. The pessimist shares with

the optimist a negative assessment of determinism. Both leave unchallenged the value

of the metaphysical conception of human freedom in terms of the transcendence of

nature. The value placed on freedom in this traditional sense, the basis of the notion

of ‘human dignity,’ is the source of the pessimistic response to the insights of

determinism which undermine the credibility of the values of the rational-moral

subject.

These points also apply to teleological conceptions of the relation between man and

nature regardless of whether they take a Kantian (‘critical’) or Hegelian (‘dialectical’)

form. This is an important claim as it might be argued that teleological perspectives

are exempt from such criticisms in so far as they overcome the oppositional

conception of man/nature relation. Nietzsche attacks as thoroughly anthropomorphic

attempts to posit a harmony between nature and humanist values. He rejects

teleological modes of thought because, as a form of optimism, they presuppose a

pessimistic and negative evaluation of the non-teleological processes of nature which,

through the notion of the Dionysian, Nietzsche accords primordial ontological status.

For Nietzsche, a pessimistic response to a ‘naturalistic’ characterisation of the

essence of man is constitutive of the ‘human’. Pessimism, viewed broadly as the

negative evaluation of nature, is the condition of possibility of optimism. A

pessimistic evaluation of nature is, even for the optimist, a criterion of being human.

The project of becoming-human entails a becoming-pessimistic. All idealisms (and

all, merely anthropomorphic, materialisms) are pessimisms. For Nietzsche it is,

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strictly speaking, a contradiction in terms to speak of a non-pessimistic ‘human’.

Hence, the overcoming of pessimism and the critique of humanism are fundamentally

interconnected in Nietzsche’s thought.

Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics argues that negation is the anthropomorphism

par excellence, the fundamental ‘moral’ cornerstone underpinning post-Socratic

culture. A ‘will-to-purity’ underlies the suppression of difference inherent to the

privileging, albeit in different ways, of negation in both Aristotelian and Hegelian

logic. The traditional valorisation of negation is the ultimate target of Nietzsche’s

critique of metaphysics. Negation constitutes the ‘human’ in so far as it is determined

negatively through the ‘man/nature’ opposition. Nietzsche’s critique of negation

exposes the derivative and merely ‘pragmatic’ nature of any distinction between the

‘human’ and the ‘non-human’. For Nietzsche the desire to thematise the vast

differences in complexity between ‘man’ and other animals by appealing to a

distinction in kind rather than a difference in degree is the product of a merely ‘moral’

interpretation of life.

Nietzsche conceived pessimism as the affective and evaluative condition of

possibility of negation, and hence the origin of metaphysics. For Nietzsche modern

humanism, the context for both optimism and pessimism, is a particularly virulent

instantiation of this pessimism-negation complex, the critique of which is central to

the main task of his thought - the ‘overcoming of man’. Only on the basis of such a

critique is it possible to view the demise of the ‘human’ non-pessimistically.

II

It is important to distinguish between two types of ‘overcoming of pessimism’ found

in Nietzsche’s texts. Firstly, there is the “romantic pessimism” (WP III: 846) of

Schopenhauer and Wagner which Nietzsche attacks. I shall refer to this as the ‘slave’

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overcoming of pessimism. Secondly, there is the response to pessimism Nietzsche

proposes which I shall term the ‘noble’ overcoming of pessimism.

In the ‘slave’ response to pessimism, the negative evaluation of the manifest

indifference of nature to the rational-moral ideals of humanism is assumed as an

ineliminable and universal criterion of being human. From this perspective, the only

overcoming of pessimism possible is a transcendence of ‘this world’, a ‘redemption’

from the relentless cravings of the will, the unconscious, the body etc.

In contrast, the ‘noble’ seeks an overcoming of pessimism through the elimination of

the basic pessimistic evaluation of life’s intrinsic anti-humanism. The ‘noble’

overcoming of pessimism tackles the evaluation of life behind the ‘slave’s’

valorisation of asceticism. It denies that an underlying pessimism towards ‘this

world’, the origin of metaphysics, is universal and ineliminable. For Nietzsche,

becoming-noble consists in an ever-decreasing susceptibility to pessimism. The

‘noble’ overcoming of pessimism is based on an affirmation of life that is valorised

not merely despite but because ‘this world’ is fundamentally incompatible with the

metaphysical ideals of humanism. The ‘noble’ celebrates the anti-teleological

trajectory of life and does not require the palliatives sought by the ‘slave’. For the

‘slave’, art provides an escape from life, for the ‘noble’ it offers access to the

instinctual and energetic processes of self-expenditure that characterise the essence of

life.

III

Two themes in Nietzsche’s texts are particularly relevant to the ‘noble’ overcoming

of pessimism.These are the notions of ‘transvaluation’ (Umwertung) and the

‘transfiguration’ (Verklärung/Transfiguration) of life in art.1

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The key role of the notion of transvaluation in Nietzsche’s thought reveals how his

thought surpasses a both the mere inversion of the oppositions of Platonic-Christian

metaphysics and a Hegelian Aufhebung of them. Nietzsche’s critique of the ‘slave’

overcoming of pessimism and development of a ‘noble’ alternative is engaged in the

transvaluation of the optimism/pessimism opposition. I shall argue that Nietzsche’s

notion of a ‘pessimism of strength’ (Pessimismus der Stärke) gestures towards a

‘noble’ evaluation of life unthinkable in terms of this opposition. Nietzsche conceived

his thought to be “far beyond the pitiable shallow-pated chatter about optimism

contra pessimism...” (EH, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, sect. 2).

Even though the term only occurs infrequently in his texts, the theme of the

transfiguration of life through art is an important aspect of Nietzsche’s thought. This

is demonstrated by the preponderance in his texts of a series of terms - such as

‘spiritualisation’, ‘idealisation’, ‘perfecting’ - thematically related to the theme of

transfiguration. It is possible to misinterpret these interrelated notions in Nietzsche’s

texts in terms of the transcendence of ‘this world’. If severed from some of the most

basic elements of Nietzsche’s thought, theses terms could be mistakenly taken as

evidence that Nietzsche remained, despite his numerous protestations to the contrary,

fundamentally Schopenhauerian in his conception of the nature of art and its role in

combatting pessimism.2

If the overall project of transvaluation which forms the context for Nietzsche’s use

of the term is recalled, then it is clear that an affirmation of the most fundamental

material processes of ‘this world’ through its transfiguration in art is not a

contradiction in terms. Nietzsche breaks the Platonic-Christian monopoly of notions

such as transfiguration. He develops a transvalued conception of affirmative

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transfiguration, based upon his recovery of the Dionysian as an alternative to the

interpretation of transfiguration in transcendent terms. As he states,

...we infuse a transfiguration and fullness into things and poetize about them until they reflect back our fullness and joy in life: sexuality; intoxication...when we encounter things that display this transfiguration and fullness, the animal responds with an excitation of those spheres in which all those pleasurable states are situated - and a blending of these very delicate nuances of animal well-being and desires constitutes the aesthetic state. The latter appears only in natures capable of that bestowing and overflowing fullness of bodily vigor (WP III: 801).

Nietzsche does not seek merely to give a ‘naturalised’ interpretation of works of art

that are transfigurative in the traditional sense, but also reclaims the term in a positive

application to affirmative works of Dionysian art. This reveals a contrast between a

‘slave’ sense of transfiguration concerned with an elevation toward a transcendent

realm and a ‘noble’, transvalued conception of transfiguration which affirms the

immanent transcendence of material life.3

There is, therefore, nothing contradictory about Nietzsche’s retention of the notion of

transfiguration within a ‘physiology of art’. The role of the term in his texts does not

signal a residual Schopenhauerian element in his conception of art at odds with the

theme of affirmation. There is no conflict in Nietzsche’s thought between a

conception of art as “an excess and overflow of blooming physicality” (WP III: 802)

and an insistence on its transfigurative power. It is only the Platonic-Christian

interpretation of transfiguration which precludes it from being aligned with “the

images and desires of intensified life” (ibid). Nietzsche develops a non-moral

conception of transfiguration concerned with the enhancement of life rather than an

escape from it. He seeks “to bring to light the “basic idealizing powers” (sensuality,

intoxication, superabundant animality)” (WP III: 823). Nietzsche develops this sense

of transfiguration in a passage that responds to the question “Pessimism in art?”,

...what is essential in art remains its perfection of existence, its production of perfection and plenitude; art is essentially affirmation, blessing, deification of existence - (WP III: 821).

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In the following passage Nietzsche undertakes a transvaluation of the

supersensuous/sensuous opposition and conceives the transfiguration of life through

art as the self-intensification of material life itself which displaces the artist from

creator to cipher:

[In] the highest and most illustrious human joys, in which existence celebrates its own transfiguration... [...das Dasein seine eigene Verklärung feiert...] ...the most sensual functions are finally transfigured by a symbol-intoxication of the highest spirituality [...einem Gleichnis-Rausche der höchsten Geistigkeit verklärt werden]; they experience a kind of deification of the body in themselves [sie empfinden an sich eine Art Vergöttlichung des Leibes...] as distant as possible from the ascetic philosophy of the proposition “God is a spirit” (WP IV:1051).

Nietzsche’s thoroughly non-pessimistic evaluation of the reappropriation of man into

the auto-transfigurative artistic processes of life is stated thus,

...from that height of joy where man feels himself to be altogether a deified form and a self-justification of nature...the Greeks called by the divine name: Dionysus (ibid).

For Nietzsche art is the least human of all ‘cultural’ products. It is a fundamental

process of material life that periodically invades the ‘human’ and employs it in order

to expend itself ‘without a purpose’ as Kant would say. Nietzsche conceives the

relation between nature and art in radically immanent terms. Art is nature’s form of

“self-overcoming”:

...art is not merely imitation of the reality of nature but rather a metaphysical supplement of the reality of nature, placed beside it for its overcoming...[the] metaphysical intention of art [is] to transfigure (BT 24).

A Schopenhauerian interpretation of this Nietzschean sense of transfiguration is

seriously flawed. For Nietzsche, the transfigurative power of art offers ‘salvation’

from the desire for the transcendent and makes possible a transvalued, affirmative

inhabitation of the most basic material processes of ‘this world’.

IV

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That the later Nietzsche espoused what I haved termed the ‘noble’ overcoming of

pessimism through art is an uncontentious claim. As he states,

The tragic artist is not a pessimist - it is precisely he who affirms all that is questionable and terrible in existence, he is Dionysian...an overflowing feeling of life and energy... provided us with the key to the concept of tragic feeling, which was misunderstood ...especially by our pessimists. Tragedy is so far from providing evidence for pessimism ...in Schopenhauer’s sense that it is has to be considered the decisive repudiation of that idea... Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems...that is what I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet (TI, ‘‘Reason’ In Philosophy’, sect. 6; ‘What I Owe to the Ancients’, sect. 5).

However, many have challenged Nietzsche’s retrospective claims for the radicality of

The Birth of Tragedy (hereafter BT) agreeing with the more negative self-assessments

of texts such as ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’ (hereafter ASC).4 Nietzsche’s overall

evaluation of BT is ambiguous. For example, in ASC - a text which contains some

very negative comments on BT - Nietzsche states: “here, perhaps for the first time, a

pessimism ‘beyond good and evil’ is suggested” (ASC 5). Elsewhere, BT is described

as “my first transvaluation of all values” (TI, ‘What I Owe to the Ancients’, sect. 5).

A principal source of error in readings of BT is a failure to appreciate the

complexities of the periodisation of Greek cultural history Nietzsche proposes,

especially in his account of the pre-Socratic period (cf. BT 2-4). Nietzsche does

identify a period of Greek art history which can be legitimately interpreted in

Schopenhauerian terms. However, Nietzsche argues that, through tragedy, the Greeks

surpassed such a conception of the relation between art and life.5

Nietzsche’s portrayal of the pre-Socratic Greeks can be characterised as a

progression from the ‘slave’ to the ‘noble’ type of overcoming of pessimism through

art. In the pre-tragic period the Greeks cultivated the Apollonian, the Olympian order

of the Gods and Doric art. The ‘shining images’ of the Apollonian offered a

“redemption through illusion” (BT 4) from a negative evaluation of life; a pessimism

expressed in the ‘wisdom of Silenus’ (BT 3). A Schopenhauerian interpretation of

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this period of Greek culture is plausible, but this is not the period of Greek culture by

which Nietzsche is most impressed. Nietzsche argues that the Greeks succeeded,

through the transfigurative powers of tragedy, in achieving a ‘noble’ solution to

pessimism in terms of the affirmation of the Dionysian. Thus the art of the tragic

period cannot be adequately interpreted in Schopenhauerian terms.

Nietzsche offers a cultural pathology of Greek culture in terms of the ebb and flow of

‘health’ and ‘sickness’ within it. He charts a becoming-noble (i.e. the birth of

tragedy) which overcomes the pessimism of an earlier, ‘Silenesian’, period. This

overcoming of pessimism employs different artistic means than those found during

the pre-tragic period. The tragic period develops a new configuration of the

Apollonian and Dionysian that challenges the ‘Silenesian’ evaluation of life.

This tragic phase is superseded by a becoming-slave (i.e. the death of tragedy), the

triumph of the ‘weak’ who supplant the affirmation of the Dionysian found in the

tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus. Nietzsche’s revaluation of Greek cultural

history interprets the rise of ‘theoretical optimism’ and ‘aesthetic Socratism’ as a

physiological degeneration. This post-tragic denial of the Dionysian and valorisation

of ‘theoretical man’ forms the complimentary, optimistic opposite to the pre-tragic,

pessimistic phase of Greek culture. Nietzsche confirms this complicity, the shared

negative evaluation of the Dionysian, when he asks, “is the resolve to be so scientific

about everything perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from, pessimism?” (ASC 1).

For Nietzsche, the achievement of the Greeks in the tragic period lies in their non-

dialectical overcoming through tragedy of the - albeit complex - oppositionality that

characterised the relation between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in the pre-tragic

period.6 This non-totalising fusion in tragedy of the Apollonian and Dionysian in

terms of a pre-oppositional relation of difference allowed the Greeks to overcome, in

9

a ‘noble’ way, the pessimism of the pre-tragic period in which the Apollonian was

negatively related to the Dionysian.

The key element of this transformation is the nature of the ‘tragic effect’ which

Nietzsche describes as ‘metaphysical comfort’ (metaphysischer Trost).7 Through this,

the Greeks achieved a transvaluation of their earlier pessimism. As Nietzsche states,

the metaphysical comfort - with which...every true tragedy leaves us - that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable...with this...the profound Hellene, uniquely susceptible to the tenderest and deepest suffering, comforts himself, having looked boldly right into the terrible destructiveness of so-called world history as well as the cruelty of nature, and being in danger of longing for a Buddhistic negation of the will. Art saves him, and through art - life (BT 7).

Undeniably, the notion of ‘metaphysical comfort’ has Schopenhauerian resonances

and Nietzsche came to severely criticise it (cf. ASC 7). Yet this self-criticism can be

questioned. In fact the passage cited above does describe precisely that which

Nietzsche contrasts with it in ASC, namely the “art of this-worldy comfort” (ASC 7).8

Justification of this interpretation of the notion of ‘metaphysical comfort’ requires a

consideration of two issues firstly, the precise context of Nietzsche’s criticism of the

term and secondly, a clarification of the sense of the term ‘metaphysical’ in BT.

It is clear that ASC as a whole offers a positive evaluation of BT that clearly supports

a reading which finds intimations in it of Nietzsche’s later conception of the nature of

art, in particular his attack on Schopenhauer’s aesthetics (cf. ASC 6). When Nietzsche

introduces his criticism of the “art of metaphysical comfort” (ASC 7) this refers not

to the passage cited above but to the role of the term in one of the more uninhibited

and propagandising sections on German cultural resurgence (BT 18). The specific

context of the criticism of the notion of ‘metaphysical comfort’ (ASC 6-7) shows that

Nietzsche’s principal doubts about BT are not substantive in nature but concern the

language and rhetoric of the text, in particular its residual resonances of Romanticism

10

and pessimism (cf. ASC 7). Nietzsche acknowleges that the radicality of the claims

made were not matched by the terminology and parochial cultural politics in which it

is couched. The essential charge ASC levels against BT is that of stylistic cowardice

and modesty (cf. ASC 6). In ASC Nietzsche sacrifices a balanced interpretation of the

notion of ‘metaphysical comfort’ in order to emphasise, with unequivocal clarity, his

break with the cultural politics of BT. Nietzsche’s interpreters do not, of course, have

to read BT from such a perspective.

Much of the Schopenhauerian resonance of the notion of ‘metaphysical comfort’ is

dispelled once the meaning of the term ‘metaphysical’ in BT is examined.

Throughout the text (cf. BT 1, 4, 6, 7-10, 25) Nietzsche unashamedly and explicitly

constructs a ‘metaphysics’ in order to thematise the relation between art and life.

Clearly this ‘artist’s metaphysics’ (ASC 2, 5; BT 5, 24) must be distinguished from

the Platonic-Christian sense of the term which Nietzsche attacks as an example of the

type of metaphysics he rejects, namely ‘moral’ metaphysics. It is this Platonic-

Christian sense of the tem that is presupposed in a Schopenhauerian interpretation of

the notion of ‘metaphysical comfort’. The passage cited above which introduces the

notion of ‘metaphysical comfort’ lies at the heart of Nietzsche’s attempt to

characterise the nature of Attic tragedy. If Nietzsche’s periodisation of Greek cultural

is recalled then it is obvious that he is deploying the notion of ‘metaphysical comfort’

in order to specify the pre-Socratic Greek’s conception and evaluation of art and life.

Hence the ‘metaphysics’ Nietzsche finds inherent to Greek tragedy is clearly to be

contrasted with Platonic-Christian metaphysics which presupposes the ‘death of

tragedy’.

Thus it is Nietzsche’s ‘artist’s metaphysics’ which is the sense of the term

‘metaphysical’ relevant to the interpretation of the notion of ‘metaphysical comfort’.

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The metaphysics of the tragic period is fundamentally immanentist or ‘this worldly’

in orientation. The nihilistic Platonic-Christian identity of the metaphysical with the

transcendent has not yet triumphed. The ‘aesthetical metaphysics’ (BT 5) Nietzsche

finds in the tragic period identifies the Dionysian with the most primordial processes

of nature. This is a ‘metaphysics’ as it is concerned with dimensions of life ‘beyond’,

in the sense of irreducible to, ‘appearances’ or the ‘empirical reality’ of the discrete

spatio-temporal objects available to scientific investigation. The Dionysian cannot be

objectified or reduced to this order of representation. Whatever criticisms Nietzsche

later made of the Kantian-Schopenhaurian terminology of BT it is clear that the text’s

identification of the ‘noumena’ with the Dionysian has already overcome the notion

of the transcendent.

As ‘metaphysical’ the Dionysian is concerned with ‘self-transcendence’. This is not

to be interpreted in supersensuous terms but as the dissolution of the derivative field

of the principium individuationis and the reaffirmation of the more primordial

dimensions of ‘this world’. The ‘mystical oneness’ and ‘primal unity of all things’

Nietzsche refers to concerns an economy of differential relations of more primordial

ontological status than the empirical order of discrete identities founded upon

negation. Hence the ‘metaphysical’, in the sense it has in BT, is immanent rather than

transcendent as it refers to the Dionysion essence of ‘this world’.

Once the periodisation of Greek culture Nietzsche offers in BT is appreciated, the

‘salvation’ through art described in the passage cited above cannot be read in terms of

the ‘slave’ solution to pessimism. Nietzsche does not align the ‘metaphysical comfort’

provided by tragedy with a flight from life towards the transcendent nor with the

‘resignationism’ which Schopenhauer found in tragedy. Rather, Nietzsche conceives

tragedy as that which, through the ‘metaphysical comfort’ it offers, ‘redeems’ man

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from the pessimistic evaluation of life which was the condition of possibility of the

pre-tragic Greeks’ need for the distracting, illusory visions of beauty (the Apollonian)

to counter their negative response to the truth (the Dionysian). Tragedy is that

‘noble’, transvaluative response to existence which not only resists, without recourse

to optimism, the onset of pessimism but finds “indestructibly powerful and

pleasurable” (BT 7) precisely those aspects of life (“...the terrible destructiveness of

so-called world history as well as the cruelty of nature...” [ibid]) most likely to

engender pessimism and the ‘slave’ response to it.

As the passages cited above make clear art, and in particular tragedy, does not merely

provide palliatives for pessimism. It makes possible, principally through the

transformation in the Apollonian from the pre-tragic to tragic periods, an affirmative

response to Dionysian reality without recourse to a process of desensitisation. The

“profound Hellene” remains, Nietzsche insists, “uniquely susceptible to the tenderest

and deepest suffering” (ibid). The example of the ‘slave’ solution Nietzsche offers in

the passage cited above is the “Buddhistic negation of the will” (ibid) which is an

obvious implicit criticism of Schopenhauer. It is precisely as this ‘slave’ solution to

pessimism threatens to take hold (“...and being in danger of longing for...” [ibid]) that

art intervenes in order to prevent its onset. The ‘salvation’ provided through the

‘metaphysical comfort’ experienced in tragedy is clearly of an immanent rather than a

transcendent variety, a point clearly signalled in the insistence in the passage cited

above that art saves not only the individual but, more importantly, life itself from the

denial of it inherent in the ‘slave’ solution to pessimism.

Thus for Nietzsche tragedy is a ‘preventative’ medicine that innoculated the Greeks

not against suffering but against the pessimistic evaluation of it. Schopenhauer’s

conception of the overcoming of pessimism through art is implicitly rejected in the

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passage cited above as it is no longer able to comprehend the advance Nietzsche

detects in Greek culture from the pre-tragic to the tragic age. As Nietzsche later

reiterated, “precisely tragedy is proof that the Greeks were no pessimists...” (EH,

‘The Birth of Tragedy’, sect.1).

Thus a ‘noble’ overcoming of pessimism through the affirmation of life in art can be

clearly discerned in BT. Nietzsche confirms this point when he states that, threatened

with the onset of “nausea...an ascetic, will-negating mood” (BT 7),

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... (ibid).

Nietzsche links his account of tragedy to the features of ancient Greek religion he

wished to contrast to the Platonic-Christian tradition (ASC 5). Greek tragedy is

conceived as an essentially religious phenomenon (cf. BT 7, 23) which offers an

alternative form of ‘salvation’ and ‘redemption’ to that found in Christianity. As

Nietzsche’s account of the ‘mystery doctrine of tragedy’ (BT 10; cf. BT 8, 9)

demonstrates, tragedy affirms the pre-individuated and impersonal nature of the

Dionysian essence of the ‘eternal life’ ‘this world’ in contrast to the anthropomorphic

notion of individuation through negation. This, inherently pessimistic category,

reaches its reductio ad absurdum in Nietzsche’s view in the Platonic-Christian notion

of the immortality of the individual soul.

V

For Nietzsche, the Greeks of the tragic period provide the key historical example of

an affirmative culture relevant to the question of the ‘future of the human’, so far as

this is identified with the nascent “rebirth of tragedy” (BT 19) Nietzsche discerns on

the horizon of Western culture. This topic is introduced through the figure of the

‘music-practicising Socrates’ (cf. BT 14, 15). In the modern period Nietzsche detects,

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especially in the thought of Kant and Schopenhauer (cf. BT 18, 19), an increasing

momentum in the historical process of the self-overcoming of ‘theoretical optimism’.

This can be characterised as a becoming-noble, a process of cultural revitalisation that

announces the advent of a “tragic culture” (BT 18).

However, it is important to appreciate the limits of such favourable references

Schopenhauer in BT. Nietzsche’s acknowledgment of the key role played by

Schopenhauer’s thought in the radicalisation of the Kantian project of the critique of

metaphysics does not, despite the presence in BT of many themes and terms drawn

from Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, entail an agreement on Nietzsche’s part with

Schopenhauer’s conception of the nature and role of art. The unequivocal and explicit

rejection of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics found in Nietzsche’s later texts is already

apparent in BT. Schopenhauer conceives art as a form of the ‘denial of the will’ all

manifestations of which are to valued as, for Schopenhauer, an ‘affirmation of the

will’ - in the sense he understands it - inevitably leads to pessimism given its

incompatibility with the the transcendent form of transcendence his thought sustains.

Nietzsche does not share his philosophical predecessors’ ingrained hostility towards

the ‘will’ nor their anthropomorphic conception of it. Already in BT Nietzsche

develops a non-transcendent conception of transcendence - the ‘transfiguration’

discussed above. Nietzsche’s rethinks the ‘will’ in the radically non-utilitarian guise

of the Dionysian. This makes possible a type of self-transcendence through the

affirmation rather than negation of ‘this world’. Thus in BT Nietzsche acknowledges

Schopenhauer’s thought as a crucial, but ultimately only preliminary phase, in the

process of the auto-critique of reason which exposes the limits of an unfettered

rationalism.

VI

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For Nietzsche, a key aspect of Greek tragedy is the transvaluation it made possible

in the conception of, and response to, suffering. Beyond a negative evaluation of the

suffering associated with the undermining of the principium individuationis the

‘noble’ embraces ‘suffering’ as an affirmation of the priority of life over the

delimited individual. Nietzsche later characterises this ‘noble’ evaluation of suffering

as a “joy in destruction” (TI, ‘What I Owe to the Ancients’, sect. 5). In ASC this

‘noble’ embrace of the multiplicity and becoming intrinsic to life is described as a

‘pessimism of strength’ (Pessimismus der Stärke),

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? Is it perhaps possible to suffer precisely from overfullness? (ASC 1)

Nietzsche insists upon a ‘physiological’ interpretation of the ‘noble’ and ‘slave’

evaluations of suffering. Both optimism and pessimism are symptoms of sickness.

The “triumph of optimism” (ASC 4) is described as “a decline of

strength...physiological weariness...” (ibid, cf. TI, ‘Expeditions of an Untimely One’,

sect. 36). The predominance of instincts of self-preservation over self-expenditure

within the ‘slave’, the source of their valorisation of reason and morality, is for

Nietzsche a physiological weakness. The affirmative response of the ‘noble’ to the

anti-teleological essence of life is, as the passage cited above states, an indication of

‘overflowing health’. Only those who are themselves dominated by instincts of self-

expenditure (ie. ‘fullness of existence’) can affirm the priority of life over the

individuated self.

Given these different instinctual and affective economies, the ‘noble’ and the ‘slave’

evaluate life differently and therefore experience distinct forms of suffering. In the

passage cited above, Nietzsche, in asking “is it possible to suffer precisely from

16

overfullness?”, raises the issue of the specific nature of the suffering that afflicts the

‘strong’. There are types of “Dionysian madness” (ASC 4) that Nietzsche

characterises as “neuroses of health” (ibid). The ‘pessimism of strength’ can be

related to the contrast between the two conceptions of the “meaning of suffering”

described in the following passage:

One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of suffering: whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the former case it is supposed to be the path to a holy existence; in the latter case, being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering. The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering: he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deifying to do so (WP IV: 1052).

The ‘noble’ type of suffering arises not from the threat posed to the stability of the

individuated self by the Dionysian, but from the reductive nature of individuation and

the imposition of negation on self-differing life. In contrast to the sufferings of the

‘slave’ when their predominant instinct of self-preservation is challenged, Nietzsche

describes a ‘noble’ type of ‘Dionysian suffering’ induced by the ‘agonies of

individuation’. This, he suggests, is the meaning of the theme of the

‘dismemberment’ of Dionysus (BT 10). The Dionysian type regards “the state of

individuation as the origin and primal cause of all suffering, as something

objectionable in itself...” (ibid).

Hence the ‘slave’ suffers from the collapse of individuation, the ‘noble’ from its

institution. The ‘slave’ defends negation and tries to interpret life ‘dialectically’, the

‘noble’ abhors negation and conceives life as an economy of pre-oppositional forces

in excess of all determination. Whilst the ‘slave’ can only interpret suffering

negatively, the ‘noble’, through art, attains a transvalued relation to it. As Nietzsche

states,

...Art as the redemption of the sufferer - as the way to states in which suffering is willed, transfigured, deified, where suffering is a form of great delight (WP III: 853). Thus the issue of the ‘future of the human’ is, for Nietzsche, the question of the

continuing prevalence of the instinctual enfeeblement which constitututes the

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‘human’ and is the source of the pessimistic denial of the Dionysian. Nietzsche’s texts

are often characterised by what can be termed an anti-humanist optimism based on a

conception of the historicality of the West in terms of a process of ‘self-overcoming’.

Given both the transvaluative trajectory of his thought and its rejection of

transcendent in favour of immanent models of transcendence, then such ‘optimism’

concerns the demise of theological and humanist values and the revival of ‘tragic

insight’.

VII

In a text entitled ‘On the Pessimism of Strength’ (WP IV: 1019), Nietzsche offers a

complimentary account to that found in BT of the historico-cultural conditions that

point towards the revival of a ‘noble’ interpretation of life described as “this symptom

of highest culture” (ibid). Nietzsche charts a gradual transvaluation of the initial

pessimistic relation to three features of existence - “chance, the uncertain, the sudden”

(der Zufall, das Ungewisse, das Plötzliche). He states:

the whole history of culture represents a diminution of this fear of chance, the uncertain, the sudden. For culture means learning to calculate, to think causally, to forestall, to believe in necessity.” (WP IV: 1019).

The rise of ‘civilization’, which requires, as its condition of possibility, the

pessimism of the ‘primitive’, leads to the virtual abolition of all “ills” and the

submission to them, “called religion and morality” (ibid). However, this investment in

reason is only a prelude, albeit a necessary one, that makes possible a transvaluative

development. The contemporary epoch’s critique of the value of the unrestrained

advance of civilization aims not at an impossible ‘return to nature’ but to a

transvalued affirmation of life not available to our fearful predecessors. Hence,

belief in law and calculability enter consciousness in the form of satiety and disgust - the delight in chance, the uncertain and sudden becomes titillating (ibid).

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Nietzsche identifies this transvaluated relation to the anti-teleological dimensions of

life as a ‘pessimism of strength’. A new taste is developed for the incalculable,

increasingly modern man “finds senseless ills the most interesting”,

...he now takes delight in a world disorder without God, a world of chance, to whose essence belong the terrible, the ambiguous, the seductive (ibid).

The ‘pessimism of strength’ is characterised in terms which reveal its distinction

from the pessimism-humanism complex,

animality no longer arouses horror; esprit and happy exuberance in favor of the animal in man is in such ages the most triumphant form of spirituality (ibid).

The final stage of the history of the emergence of a ‘pessimism of strength’

illustrates the transvaluative radicality of Nietzsche’s thought as it concerns the

religious affirmation of ‘this world’:

this pessimism of strength...ends in theodicy i.e., in an absolute affirmation of the world - but for the very reasons that formerly led one to deny it - and in this fashion to a conception of this world as the actually-achieved highest possible ideal (ibid).

VIII

Nietzsche’s conception of the Greeks’ non-pessimistic affirmation of the Dionysian

can be interpreted in terms of a tragic conception of the sublime, a notion which

makes a fleeting appearance in the context of the discussion of ‘metaphysical

comfort’ (BT 7). In Nietzsche’s case, the limit encountered in the sublime is that of

the negation which constitutes the ‘human’; the dissolution of the man/nature

distinction. This is the key element in Nietzsche’s characterisation of the Dionysian.

The tragic sublime tacitly thematised in Nietzsche’s texts is radically distinct from

metaphysical (in the transcendent sense) conceptions of the sublime, most notably

Kant’s moral-humanist account of it. 9 All non-tragic conceptions of the sublime

assume, with varying degrees of complexity, the ‘two-world’ metaphysics

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inaugurated by Socrates. They are therefore intrinsically pessimistic appropriations of

the sublime in transcendent terms that refuse to align identify it with ‘this world. The

‘noble’ conception of the sublime of the tragic period is affirmative not negative, in

character. It challenges the pessimism that underpins conceptions of the sublime such

as Kant’s the aim of which is to reinforce the man/nature distinction. The Kantian

sublime uncritically celebrates the supersensuous reference of the theoretical and

practical ‘ideas of reason’. This rests on a reductive interpretation of the sensuous and

empirical in terms of utility. In contrast, the tragic sublime implicitly developed in

BT, is concerned with the immanent transcendence of the Dionysian. Nietzsche’s

transvaluative radicalisation of the Kantian-Schopenhauerian project of critique

rejects all merely ‘moral’ or transcendent conceptions of transcendence. Hence his

thought contains a ‘non-moral’, tragic conception of the sublime in contast to Kant’s

‘moral’ conception of it.

In BT, the Dionysian is conceived in terms of the essential sublimity of the return of

the impersonal and self-differential forces of life which undermines the principium

individuationis, a surpassing of all empirical limit and measure encapsulated in the

statement “Excess revealed itself as truth” (BT 4). The tragic sublime is the disclosure

of a the immanent transcendence of the material forces of ‘this world’ rather than, as

in Kant, a ‘negative presentation’ of the ‘intelligible in the sensible’.10

Thus Nietzsche finds in Greeks of the tragic period an overcoming of pessimism

through sublime art which transfigures the self-overcoming material processes of

nature. The tragic sublime affirms the Dionysian state in which “everything

subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness” (BT 1). Rather than

underscoring the man/nature distinction, the tragic sublime marks the moment of its

dissolution. As Nietzsche states,

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under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man (BT 1).

Nietzsche’s tragic sublime is the celebration of the surrender to the joys of ‘this-

worldy’ intoxication, the pleasures arising from the transgression of the limits of

individuation. The sublimity of life itself is described thus:

this world: a monster of energy...as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms...blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness:...my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying... (WP IV: 1067).

The overcoming of pessimism in the ‘noble’ sense affirms the insignificance of the

human in this “sea of forces”. Refusing negation, the ‘noble’ conceives the ‘human’

as a contested site of anonymous multiple becomings. To affirm the tragic sublime is

to evaluate non-pessimistically this becoming-impersonal. From a ‘noble’ perspective

the topic of the ‘future of the human’ appears suspiciously pessimistic and

incompatible with Nietzsche’s project of de-anthropomorphisation. It risks

perpetuating the anthropological misinterpretation of history. The future is, like the

past, not ours to ponder, let alone determine.

For Nietzsche, the ‘human’ is a product of the self-interpreting processes of material

life. His critique of values is characterised by an insistence on the anonymity of the

forces that form the ‘human’. To overcome pessimism through an affirmation of the

tragic sublime is to acknowledge that:

...many species of animals have already vanished; if man too should vanish nothing would be lacking in the world. One must be enough of a philosopher to admire this nothing, too... (WP II: 302).

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Abbreviations

All texts by F. Nietzsche

ASC ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’ (in BT)

BT The Birth of Tragedy (New York: Random House, 1967, trans. W.Kaufmann)

EH Ecce Homo (London: Penguin, 1979, trans. R.J.Hollingdale)

TI Twilight of the Idols (London: Penguin, 1968, trans. R.J.Hollingdale)

WP The Will to Power (New York: Random House, 1967, trans. W.Kaufmann and

R.J.Hollingdale)

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Notes

1. For a discussion of the role of these two terms for ‘transfiguration’ in Nietzsche’s

texts see Paul J.M. Van Tongeren, ‘Nietzsche’s Transfiguration of History:

Historicality as Transfiguration’, Epoch é vol. 2, no. 2 (1994) pp. 23-46. For other

discussions of this topic see David B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche (Cambridge

Mass.: MIT Press, 1985) part III.

2. For such an interpretation see Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art

(Cambridge: CUP Press, 1992). Young’s Schopenhauerian reading of the account of

the relation between art and the overcoming of pessimism found in BT can claim

some, albeit superficial, plausibility. However, his attempt to force Nietzsche’s 1880s

texts into a similarly Schopenhauerian mould is unconvincing. For a brief and more

impressive discussion than Young’s of the key issues in this area see, Jacques

Taminiaux, ‘Art and Truth in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’ in his Poetics,

Speculation and Judgment: The Shadow of the Work of Art from Kant to

Phenomenology (New York: S.U.N.Y. Press, 1993, trans. Michael Gendre) pp. 111-

126. For a thorough and nuanced discussion of the Nietzsche/Schopenhauer relation

see John Sallis: Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy (Chicago: Uni. of

Chicago Press, 1991) passim.

3. Literary examples of the ‘noble’ type of transfiguration abound in the ‘aesthetics of

degradation’ that characterise the texts of Charles Bukowski, Louis-Ferdinand

Céline, Jean Genet, Henry Miller.

4. An example of such an assessment of BT is Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and

Philosophy (London: Athlone, 1983, trans. H.Tomlinson) pp. 10-38. Unlike Young

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(op. cit.), Deleuze appreciates that Nietzsche’s later conception of art attains a

radicality unthinkable in Schopenhauerian terms.

5. For a discussion of Nietzsche’s account of the phases of Greek culture see M.S.

Silk and J.P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1981) pp. 150-159, 185-187.

6. I disagree therefore with Nietzsche’s claim that BT “...smells offensively

Hegelian...” (EH, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, sect. 1). Deleuze pursues the interpretative

possibilities of this comment, (op. cit) pp. 11-12.

7. My discussion of this theme is indebted to two texts by John Sallis, ‘The Play of

Tragedy’ in Tulane Studies in Philosophy 19, (1970) pp. 89-108 and Crossings:

Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy (op. cit) pp. 91-101. Nonetheless, I conceive the

radicality of BT differently to Sallis. For an interesting discussion of Nietzsche’s

criticism of the notion of ‘metaphysical comfort’ see Daniel Conway, ‘Returning to

Nature: Nietzsche’s Götterdämmerung’ in Peter.R. Sedgewick (ed.), Nietzsche: A

Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 31-52.

8. Obviously this raises complex hermeneutical questions concerning both the

applicability to Nietzsche’s texts of the objectivist assumptions of periodisation and

of how to interpret Nietzsche’s assessment of his texts (particularly when, as with BT,

they are conflictual). Any prioritisation in principle of an author’s evaluation of their

texts over other assessments of them rests on highly questionable hermeneutic

presuppositions.

9. I contrasted Nietzsche’s and Kant’s conceptions of the sublime in ‘‘Raw Nature’:

Figures of the Sublime in Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger’, Manchester Papers in

Philosophy and Phenomenology, 1, (1996).

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10. For an excellent account of the immanent nature of Dionysian ‘otherness’ see

Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘The Masked Dionysus of Euripides’ Bacchae’ in Jean-Pierre

Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York:

Zone Books, 1990, trans. J. Lloyd) pp. 381-412.

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