Page 11 - GALIET WHIM WILL AND WOE: The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche IV

Galiet & Galiet
Nietzsche, tragedy is not purgation, but a vital, luxuriant, ardent tonic drunk and loved by all strong eras and all heroic characters. Only in this manner, Nietzsche proclaims, tragic heroes are able to feel pain as pleasure. One of the most powerful aspects of an individual’s consciousness, posits Nietzsche, is that he can recognize the horrible character of things.
It would be an error to suppose, as many of Nietzsche’s hermeneutists have, that he is content in juxtaposing war to peace, cruelty to goodness, suffering to joy. In fact, Nietzsche does not predicate Dionysus as the highest aim of tragedy, but his reconciliation with Apollo: a Dionysus capable of speaking the language of Apollo and an Apollo capable of speaking the language of Dionysus.12 It is characteristic of Nietzsche that he does not wish to extirpate the passions (as, in his view, Christianity does) but to have Apollo tame them. Nietzsche’s notion of tragedy is a consequence of his entire philosophy: it is a reaction against contemporary tensions. Living in an era of asphyxia, dominated by the tyranny of the masses, hypocrisy, phariseeism and the superficial, rational optimism of science, Nietzsche affirms one has to learn to liberate energies to dominate them. As a result, Nietzsche professes a future of Greek cheerfulness, of superabundant life in which life becomes and models art. Thus, Dionysian tragedy, myth, music and art for art’s sake are to be reborn as a means to awaken, restore and purify the too languid German Spirit.
Nietzsche forgets that tragedy can also be sordid and give origin not to the Superhuman but to the infrahuman. Wagner’s tragedies, just as Sophoclean and Aeschylean ones, reinforce superiority of race, nationhood, morality and identity.
Homo. “Why I am so Clever.” 10. 37-38. Nietzsche. Ecce Homo. “Why I am so Clever.” How One Becomes What One Is. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin Books, 1979.
12 Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. Chapter 21. Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Clifton P. Fadiman. New York: Dover Publications, 1995.
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