While no one would deny that Nietzsche admired the ancient Greeks, few would hold that he admired the polis for its democracy. He pays almost no attention to the institutions of Athenian democracy – nowhere in his work, for instance, does he mention the boulē (council) or the pnyx (assembly place). His most extensive engagement with the polis comes in an early piece, “The Greek State,” the third of the “Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books,” a leather-bound volume that he presented to Cosima Wagner for Christmas in 1872.1 Originally he had intended that it be part of The Birth of Tragedy (a potential sub-title of which was “Considerations on the ethico-political significance of drama”).
It is an essay that many wish he had not written; a central source for those who find Nietzsche harsh or “aristocratic.” What are his concerns? First, the essay was written shortly after the uprising of the Paris Commune. Nietzsche had panicked at the rumor that the Louvre had been put to the torch and that the culture collected there had been destroyed. Second, he was engaging in a controversy that had accompanied the rebirth of interest in the classical world, as to whether ancient slavery was primarily an economic or, rather and more importantly, a social and cultural matter.2 Some held slavery to have ultimately been incompatible with the nature of the Greek state; others thought it essential or at least not in contradiction.
Nietzsche makes several claims. First, that for “the Greeks” work or labor (Arbeit) – that is, attending to that which was necessary simply to remain alive – was ignominious; to this, he immediately adds that they also found the “human thing” itself (Menschending) to be a disgrace as existence has no value in itself. Those who work to maintain existence (be it their own or that of others) are “slaves.” Slavery is less a political category than a description of a particular type of individual. As such, Nietzsche’s language is not all that different from that of those who protested against capitalism on the grounds that it made “wage-slaves” out of human beings. Rousseau offers a similar picture at the end of the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.
Nietzsche differs from these analyses especially in the fact that he designates concepts such as “the rights of man” and the “dignity of labor” as rationalizations that the slave gives to himself in order to hide his condition from himself. Thus all those who hold to such concepts are in fact what Nietzsche means by slaves. Nietzsche distinguishes this group from those he sometimes refers to as “the Greeks” and sometimes as a “privileged class”: they make culture possible. Culture thus rests on something shameful and hidden; culture also produces or makes possible “a new world of needs.” Here one might compare Nietzsche’s understanding of “master” and “slave” to Hegel’s analysis of “Lordship and Bondage” and the latter’s dialectical privileging of the bondsman in The Phenomenology of Mind. Both, one might start out by noting, find that the bondsman or slave wins out over the master. For Nietzsche, as for Hegel and Marx, in a world shaped by the structures of inequality, the victory will also go to the weak – the “slaves.”3
The maintenance of this condition – itself sometimes threatened in the early stages of great religions – is effectuated by the state. The states, and culture, thus rest on violence – a point that in different ways will later be made by Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, V. I. Lenin, Jacques Derrida, and Walter Benjamin, among others. However, the only proper response to this situation is to be political. The Greeks, Nietzsche continues, were thus “political men in their nature (an sich),” even more so than those of the most comparable period, the Renaissance. Politics is here conceived of agonistically and as struggle: the political agōn (competition) makes acceptable the violent ground of the state. The present age is, however, characterized by “dangerous atrophies of the political sphere” and by individuals who use states for their own interests, “international money-hermits” who disseminate the “liberal-optimistic” view of the world they have taken over from the Enlightenment. Today one would reflect on the consequences of globalization for the political.4
There is more here than might immediately meet the eye. The point of the analysis in “The Greek State” is to say that those who are not their own person, whose voice is not their own, are, in effect, slaves, that is, not capable of citizenry. The judgment is not dissimilar to that made by Kant in “What is Enlightenment?” where he speaks of the importance of having a voice that is authentically one’s own.5 The period Nietzsche admires most in world history is that of Athens in the Classical Period, an Athens that was in an important sense democratic, not simply in its institutions, but in its vision of what it meant for a man to speak in his own voice.
This is an Athens that had twice thrown off tyrants: the tyranny of the Peisistratids in the late sixth century and that of the “Thirty Tyrants” in the late fifth (Ober 2005: 212–47). It is also, importantly, the Athens of the great tragedies. Jean Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal Naquet (1990) have famously pointed to the coincidence of the period of the great tragedies and the development of Athenian democracy. Tragedy, we might note here, is in itself a polyphonous medium: no one speaks for the author (“the play is the thing,” says Hamlet). As such, it seeks not to impose an authoritative answer so much as to confront the audience with important questions as to the nature of its community (see also Flaig, Chapter 3 this volume). In the Antigone, both Creon and Antigone define what they do as in accord with the nomos (law, norm). The audience is thus left to question the desirability of a definitive resolution of the nature of law (Nussbaum 2001; Else 1976; and especially Ostwald, 1969). Hence we might ask: if Nietzsche pays little attention to the political institutions of democratic Athens, what did he find to admire there? The answer, I believe, comes in his understanding of the relation between tyranny, tragedy, and the political realm. If tragedy was not necessarily institutionally democratic, it nevertheless involved the whole community6: it is in this sense politically democratic even if it is not an instance of democratic politics. (I make here the distinction between le politique and la politique: “the political” and “politics.”) It is thus also reasonable to surmise that the audience for the tragedies – which were a public ritual – was more inclusive than the participation in political life. (A final word of caution: since my concern will be with the political role of tragedy, by polis I mean here pretty much only Athens. Too often the term is taken to refer to an incoherent conglomeration of Athens, Sparta, Plato’s kallipolis, Aristotle’s “polis of our prayers” [Politics, book 7], and others [discussion in Ober 2005: 97–101]).
To approach the importance of tragedy, one should start by examining what Nietzsche says about tyranny. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche argues that the limitations of Stoicism are caused by the fact that Stoics insisted on seeing nature “as stoic and that with time this is what nature was for them… But this is an everlasting old story: what happened then to the Stoics still happens today, as soon as a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is thus this tyrannical impulse in itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the ‘creation of the world,’ to the causa prima” (BGE 9, WKG IV.2: 15).
We take a representation of the world that we have made to be the world itself: Nietzsche designates the essence of tyranny as the belief in the naturalness of the world that one has constructed. Philosophy, as a form of law-giving, of saying “thus it shall be” is, or wants to be, a creation of the world, but it also fatally takes its own creation to be the world (discussion in Euben 1990: 248–50, 36–8). Tyranny thus arises for Nietzsche from the failure to remember that we live in worlds that have been made:7 tyranny, one might say, is thus a forgetting of human agency. Much as the famous passage about “truth” as a “worn out metaphor,” as an “illusion of which one has forgotten what it really is,” there is thus a kind of built-in amnesia to tyranny, an amnesia that accompanies all acts of volition (“Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense,” WKG III.2: 369). The will, as Nietzsche notes in the chapter “On Redemption” in Zarathustra, “cannot break time” (Z ii, WKG VI.1: 173; see Strong 1988 [2000]: ch. 7).
The point here, however, has to do with what tyranny means: it is in its essence the taking as accomplished the world that one has defined, and the forgetting that the world in which one lives is one that one has made. It is for this reason that Nietzsche can write in BGE that the “will to truth… is will to power” (BGE 211, WKG VI.2: 148). It follows from this, however, that Nietzsche does not, and cannot, simply assume that one can at one’s leisure forego this process. Why not? The most noteworthy characteristic of the tyrant is his (her?) belief in his own understanding of the world as simply and finally true and his failure to question that belief. Nietzsche does not think that one could simply not believe in what one does, that one might adopt, as it were, a kind of benevolent skepticism towards oneself.
Inherent in philosophizing is thus a tyrannical element: the belief in the possibility and desirability of the possession of the truth. The desire that what one believed in one’s heart be true for all is both the essence of that element and a goal fervently sought after by ancient Greeks. It follows from this that the restraint on tyranny will not come from philosophy and this is not only because, as Alexandre Kojève wrote, “The philosopher’s every attempt at directly influencing the tyrant is necessarily ineffectual.”8 It is because philosophy is in itself tyrannizing.
I have elsewhere explored the political dimensions of Nietzsche’s understanding of tyranny (Strong 2006). Here I want to remain with the question of philosophical tyranny as Nietzsche understands it, and of the role of tragedy in mitigating that tyranny. What if a tyrant is so overwhelming that he dominates all reality? The paradigmatic case here is Homer, who is in effect a kind of philosopher-tyrant for Nietzsche. He writes:
Homer.— The greatest fact about Greek culture remains the fact that Homer became Panhellenic so soon. All the spiritual and human freedom the Greeks attained goes back to this fact. But at the same time it was also the actual doom of Greek culture, for, by centralizing, Homer made shallow and dissolved the more serious instincts of independence. From time to time an opposition to Homer arose from the depths of Hellenic feeling; but he always triumphed. All great spiritual powers exercise a suppressing effect in addition to their liberating one.9
Homer, Nietzsche concludes, “tyrannizes.”
Homer had in effect defined what it meant to be Greek. Fatally, that which was Greek then had difficulty in escaping from the constraints of the world that had come from Homer. (Here it is worth noting that Nietzsche does not attribute this achievement to a putative person, “Homer.” His contribution to the Homerfrage is to argue that “Homer” became the name for what was achieved.)10 The problem for Greece was to move away from the effective tyranny of Homer while remaining Greek. The point of Nietzsche’s analysis in his early work (but constant throughout his life) was to explore how it was possible (for it was necessary) to redefine what it meant to be a culture by extrapolating from the Greek response to a set of developments (such as living in cities, commerce, breakdown of the pre-eminence of blood relations, development of currency, or writing) that had intervened in the period after Homer.11 The polis life of the Greeks requires the ability to do away with tyranny precisely in order to preserve the competitive basis at its root: the agōn or Wettkampf (competition). Thus Nietzsche can write about ostracism:
If one wants to observe this feeling in its completely undisguised and naive expression, where it is a matter of the health of the state, then one will reflect upon the original meaning of ostracism. For example as it is pronounced by the Ephesians at the banning of Hermodorus: “Among us no one should be the best; but if someone is, let him be elsewhere and among others.” For why should no one be the best? Because then the contest would be abolished and the eternal basis of life of the Hellenic state would be endangered. Later, ostracism acquired a different relation to the contest: it was employed when there was an evident danger that one of the important persons engaged in the political and partisan race would find himself tempted in the heat of the conflict to adopt shameful and destructive means and questionable political tactics.12
Ostracism, Nietzsche goes on to say, is not a safety valve but a stimulant. Insofar as it is a “democratic” practice – it is the result of a vote – it is important to note that that practice is negative, whereas contemporary thought conceives of voting as the positive choice of a policy or a person. For the Greeks, ostracism consists in getting rid of that which would tend towards the tyrannical. Importantly, it is thus a stimulant to opening a space in which it is possible to develop what one is. In Human-All-too-Human we find a passage entitled “Begabung” (talent) that echoes arguments in the last two of the Untimely Meditations: “Everyone possesses inborn talent, but few possess the degree of inborn and acquired toughness, endurance and energy actually to become a talent, that is to say, to become what one is: which means to discharge it in works and actions.”13
Note here that while there is an elitism in Nietzsche, his concern is more with what keeps individuals from becoming what they are, rather than identifying qualities of soul that would, as it were ineluctably, raise some above others. Nietzsche’s is a democratic elitism. If, in Thoreau’s rendering of nihilism, “most men live lives of quiet desperation,” the burden of the argument in Nietzsche’s “The Use and Misuse of History for Life,” Schopenhauer as Educator,” and “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” is to point in the direction of its overcoming (detailed discussion: Strong 2008b). The problem is not one of having talent but of becoming what one is. For this reason, Nietzsche returns throughout his life to the maxim in Pindar’s Second Pythian (72): “genoi’ hoios essi mathōn: having learned, become what you are.”14
What preserves the agōn? What would it mean to so discharge one’s talent and thereby ensure the health of the city? This is the subject of, among other works, two early books: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks and The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. What is its relation to philosophy and of philosophy and tragedy to politics? Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, which remained unpublished and indeed unfinished, is about philosophy and politics and tragedy, or about the possibility of philosophy and about the role of philosophy in making culture possible; it is about what that might mean in terms of a valuation of the everyday; it offers the possibility of attaining (one’s own) genius. It is also the case that Nietzsche argued in the Birth of Tragedy that tragedy had as its purpose the revitalization of common culture in Greece. A locus of collective participation, a common festival, it was the focus where the culture came together and pursued its understanding of itself. I have elsewhere investigated Nietzsche’s understanding of the working of tragedy in detail (Strong 1988 [2000]: ch. 6) and will not repeat that analysis here. But what is often not understood is the relation of tragedy to philosophy. What is the role of philosophy, or a kind of philosophy, in making tragedy possible?15 And here Nietzsche’s analysis is one of a failed opportunity – a failure that is nonetheless important for our understanding.
Nietzsche had argued that the “philosophers” before Socrates had reformation in mind. The pre-Socratics were not philosophers in the sense that he will later attribute to Socrates. Rather they were, as he says at one point, lauter Staatsmänner – “nothing but statesmen” (“Wisdom and Science in Conflict,” WKG IV.1: 178–9). They are, in a word, political. But, he makes clear as well, the project of reformation he associates with them fails: the “dawn remained almost only a ghostly appearance” (WKG III.4: 131). This is true even of the one of these philosophers who came the closest (Empedocles) whose “soul had more compassion (Mitleiden) than any Greek soul [and] perhaps still not enough, for in the end, Greeks are poor at this and the tyrannical element became a hindrance in the blood of even the great philosophers” (ibid.). This despite the fact that “something new was in the air, as proves the simultaneous emergence of tragedy.”
The point of Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks is to explore the relation of philosophy and these thinkers to tragedy. If one reads this work together with The Birth of Tragedy (as Nietzsche had intended they should be read) the conclusion is that tragedy was necessary to put an end to the tyranny of Homer over Greece, that is, to solve the political problem of adapting to the new conditions that had arisen since Homer. What Nietzsche shows is that the unity of tragedy, philosophy, and politics that had been possible does not come off – in great part due to the effects of Socratism.
What had been possible? The forms of the true philosophical voice as Nietzsche develops them in his diadochical analysis of the pre-Platonics (as he calls them) who make the tragic age possible, are the following.16 What follows here, in other words, are the spiritual and epistemological presuppositions that make tragedy possible:
What might an age of a marriage of this philosophy and tragedy have made possible?19 Part of the answer is to be found in Nietzsche’s claim that only in Greece during the “immense” period between Thales and Socrates was the philosopher at home and not a “chance random wanderer,” “conspiring against his fatherland” (PTG I, WKG III.2: 303/33, 304/35). For a philosopher not to be a “comet,” a culture is needed. His task, as he sets it, is “to describe the world, in which the philosopher and the artist are at home” (WKG III.4: 5). Thus Nietzsche writes that he wants “to know how philosophy behaves towards an existing or developing culture which is not the enemy” (ibid. 141). In order to know this, “one must know that which we call his age” (ibid. 221).
These early philosophers can only be understood, Nietzsche avers, if we “recognize in each of them the attempt to be the initiation (Ansatz) of being a Greek reformer” (ibid. 131). The culture in which these philosophers were at home was the “tragic age.” In other words, each of these philosophers embodied an element of what it meant to do philosophy, something that in Greece was done by those who were the exponents and proponents of a culture. Philosophy and politics and tragedy are thus close to being co-terminous – or they should be. The focus on the tragic age has to do with whether or not the Greeks will successfully incorporate these elements into the world that begins with Cleisthenes’ reforms in the late sixth and lasts to the end of the fourth century. In a collection of fragments to which Nietzsche gave the general title of Science and Wisdom in Conflict, we find: “One can describe these older philosophers as those who felt the Greek air and customs as a constraint and barrier: thus as self-liberators (the war of Heraclitus against Homer and Hesiod, Pythagoras against secularization, all against myth, especially Democritus… ). I conceive of them as the precursors of a reformation of the Greeks: but not that of Socrates. One set of occurrences carried all of the reforming spirits along: the development of tragedy” (WKG IV.1: 180–1). Tragedy in this understanding is a “means” to carry out a reformation and is to be seen as made possible by and as a continuation of the individual achievements of the (pre-Socratic) philosophers. Thus Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks is an investigation of what lies behind and leads up to the developments discussed in The Birth of Tragedy. In the latter book, the elements of that which was “Greek” had remained basically unexamined. More importantly, the role of philosophy in making tragedy possible and of tragedy in putting an end to tyranny and making the polis possible had disappeared under the destructive Socratic enterprise. If philosophy is consequent to and evincing of the “human willingness to allow questions for itself which it cannot answer with satisfaction,”20 thus of humanness itself, then Nietzsche’s accusation against the effects of Socratism is that it makes such philosophy and the human impossible.
What then in Nietzsche’s understanding does tragedy accomplish for the polis? The Birth of Tragedy summarizes its political themes in the twenty-first chapter as the “most basic foundation of the life of a people” (BT 21, WKG III.1: 128: “den innersten Lebensgrund eines Volkes“). The earliest foundation had been in and from Homer. However, with the gradual development of living in cities focused around an agora rather than a palace, of commerce, of the breakdown of the pre-eminence of blood relations, of the development of currency and writing, and with the victory over the Persians and a broader peace in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Homeric model of the agōn no longer sufficed. (One can already see premonitions of these tensions in the Iliad.)21 That which was Greece was in need of re-founding – that is, in need of dealing with the new developments while remaining “Greek.” It was in tragedy, Nietzsche argues, that the Greeks managed to accomplish this. “Placed between India and Rome and pressed towards a seductive choice, the Greeks succeeded in inventing a third form, in classical purity.”22 India is the undervaluation of politics and leads, says Nietzsche, to orgy and then Buddhism; Rome is the overvaluation of politics and leads to secularization and the Roman imperium.
The problem of the Birth of Tragedy, then, consists in how to transform the past from which one has sprung into a past that is adequate to the historical realities one confronts without ever losing oneself in the process. This is a central and constant theme in Nietzsche. In The Use and Misuse of History for Life we find:
For since we are the outcome of earlier generations, we are also the outcome of their aberrations, passions and errors, and indeed of their crimes; it is not possible to free oneself wholly from this chain. If we condemn these aberrations, and regard ourselves free of them, this does not alter the fact that we originate in them. The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge of it, and through a new, stern discipline combat our inborn heritage and implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away. It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate—always a dangerous attempt because it is so hard to know the limit to denial of the past and because second natures are usually weaker than first. What happens all too often is that we know the good but do not do it because we also know the better but cannot do it. But here and there a victory is nonetheless achieved, and for the combatants, for those who employ critical history for the sake of life, there is even a noteworthy consolation: that of knowing that this first nature was once a second nature and that every victorious second nature will become a first.23
Not only does this passage presage Zarathustra’s wish to replace fatherlands and motherlands with his “children’s land,” but we might even say that Nietzsche’s entire life project is contained in this paragraph. The task is to implant in ourselves a “new habit, a new instinct, a second nature,” precisely the question of re-grounding that is at the center of the Birth of Tragedy. If, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche argued, we are creatures of our past – whether as fetishes, totems, or idols – then it is only in changing the past that one creates a new present. If we are the children of our parents then it is only in changing parents, in engendering oneself that we become what we are (Strong 1981).
In effect, Nietzsche thinks that tragedy can bring about a cultural revolution: it can transform a community to such an extent that, without losing its sense of what it is, it comes to grips with historical change.24 To grasp how tragedy (possibly as reprised in Wagnerian opera) was supposed to effectuate this cultural revolution we have to look at several elements. They are all present in Nietzsche’s writings of the 1870s. The cultural revolution project has itself three separate elements, each of which operates on a different level. In “Schopenhauer as Educator,” Nietzsche develops an understanding of personal transformation; in the next of the Untimelies, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” he takes up a similar analysis but here on a social-cultural level. Finally, in the Birth of Tragedy, the individual and collective elements are brought together in an analysis of how a particular society can reground itself. These works thus have a political focus in addition to whatever other foci they may have.
The individual level: The aim of “Schopenhauer as Educator” is to establish what is necessary to make it possible to respond to an exemplar which shows one what one wishes to become. It is important to note that the essay is not actually about Schopenhauer, but about the particular relationship in which Nietzsche found himself to Schopenhauer’s work. As he planned the essay, Nietzsche entertained the possibility of calling Schopenhauer the German Zuchtmeister, a person who brings one up or into line (WKG III.4: 411). The figure of Schopenhauer is called here “exemplar.” An exemplar is what one recognizes as part of one’s self but which one is not, yet feels called to become. He calls this relation “love.” It is a recognition that happens only occasionally, when “the clouds are rent asunder, and we see how we, in common with all nature, press towards some thing that stands high over us” (UM: “Schopenhauer as Educator” [henceforth SE] 5, WKG III.1: 374). It is also democratic in the sense that it is explicitly said to be available to and, indeed, required of all: “The artist and philosopher… strike only a few and should strike all.”25 It is hard to obtain because “it is impossible to teach love” (UM: SE 6, WKG III.1: 381).
It is, however, the case that, if you will excuse me, what the world needs is “love” – a concept Nietzsche takes from Emerson. “Never was the world… poorer in love… The educated classes… become day by day restless, thoughtless and loveless.” They have, in other words, nothing to love, especially after “the waters of religion” have receded (UM: SE 4, WKG III.1: 362). I take these considerations to refer to the claim that there is nothing in the modern world for anyone to love – and that this is one of the reasons that philosophy has become impossible. Note that Nietzsche claims here that changes in the world have made this possible generality increasingly impossible.
Nietzsche now wants to establish three further claims. First, the question of love and philosophy – of education – is not one of self-recognition. The question is if it is possible to find exemplars that one can recognize as one’s own and do so with the explicit knowledge that one is not (yet) the exemplar. Exemplars will also be different for each. It is thus not about coming to know how to know yourself. “Wie finden wir uns selbst wieder?”26 – this is a question of finding, and how one will recognize something as one’s own find. Nietzsche explicitly rejects what one might call the “artichoke model” where one might discover the real person, the heart, by peeling away the inessential layers. The focus of “Schopenhauer as Educator” is on the future: on becoming what one is. Knowledge must be a form of becoming rather than recognizing. But what one is has no existence prior to its existence.
Second, in Nietzsche’s view, “one must not look back towards oneself for each glance will become the ‘evil eye’” (TI: “Skirmishes” 7, WKG VI.3: 109). The governing trope in this situation is not looking back but oversight and love. One will have found oneself when one has lost oneself and been freed by love from what one is: “What have you… truly loved? What has pulled out your soul, mastered it, and at the same time made it joyful?” Love pulls us away from ourselves and dissolves the self into what Nietzsche here calls “freedom.”27
Love and freedom are linked. Love we know is learned. So how is freedom learned? The second claim in “Schopenhauer as Educator” is that, whereas before freedom had been learned from exemplars, in the present day and age these models are by and large not available. (As I noted above, Nietzsche is, incidentally, quite clear that such models are in principle available to everyone.) Note that being free is something that must be learned: without this knowledge one is, as in The Greek State, a slave. Why, however, are such models – those one might love, that are the principle of freedom and finding – not available? Nietzsche’s answer cannot detain us here but it is the beginning of what will be a life-long theme. He tentatively attributes this phenomenon to a double fact: first, Christianity had triumphed over antiquity and, second, it is now in decline. People are now in a “vacillation” (UM: SE 2, WKG III.1: 340–1), suspended between two incompatible poles and immobilized because drawn towards each. The contemporary world is characterized by Nietzsche as being without a destination that might offer a place to rest. It was from this condition, Nietzsche says, that he found release when he found an educator. But such an educator, such love – the capacity for philosophy – is rare, almost non-existent. Why so? Nietzsche ties this to a tendency among modern philosophers to moralize the world and, in particular, to moralize morality, to become “reformers of life” rather than philosophers (UB: SE 3, WKG III.1: 358).
The cultural level: The second element in this project of transfiguration is addressed in “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.” Here Nietzsche names the possibility of encountering at any moment of one’s life “something higher than” oneself, whose claim one can nonetheless not deny as it is “the sense of the tragic.” Wagner showed the possibility of this by finding or rather uncovering a relationship between “music and life” and “music and drama.” And it is this that Wagner bids to “set right the ills of the day” (UM: RWB 4–5, WKG IV.1: 24–6). What are these ills? Language was “originally supremely adapted… to the [expression] of strong feelings.” Now, forced to “encompass the realm of thought,” it is “sick.” “Man can no longer express his needs and distress by means of language; thus he can no longer really communicate at all.” It is now the case that language drives us where we “do not really want to go.” In fact, it makes association for common action impossible. Nietzsche writes:
As soon as men attempt to come to an understanding with one another, and to unite for a common work, they are seized by the madness of universal concepts, indeed even by the mere sound of words, and, as a consequence of the incapacity to communicate, everything they do together bears the mark of this mutual misunderstanding, inasmuch as it does not correspond to their real needs but only to the hollowness of those tyrannical words and concepts: thus to all its other sufferings mankind adds suffering from convention, that is to say, from a mutual agreement as to words and actions without a mutual agreement as to feeling.28
The problem thus is in getting people “to feel correctly” and this is what the “music of our German masters” makes audible: correct feeling. Nietzsche sees this as a “return to nature, while being at the same time the purification and transformation of nature; for the pressing need for that return to nature arose from the souls of men filled with love, and in their art there sounds nature transformed in love.”29 What does this mean? If nature is by music transformed in love it means, given what we have seen about love in “Schopenhauer as Educator,” that music determines the space in which we can be called to (Babich 2006: chs. 3, 6; Strong 2004). Nietzsche goes on to argue that “the soul of music now wants to create for itself a body,” that mousikē “reaches out … to gymnastics” (RWB 5, WKG IV.1: 30). Right feeling thus occurs when a world comes into being in which the words we use no longer reflect our illusions. Such people, “the thousands in populous cities,” have what Nietzsche calls “incorrect feelings” which “prevent them from admitting to themselves that they live in misery; if they wanted to make themselves understood by another, their understanding is as it were paralyzed by a spell… Thus they are completely transformed and reduced to helpless slaves of incorrect feelings.”30
In Wagner’s music “all that is visible in the world wants to become more profound and more intense by becoming audible, and wants, as it were, to assume bodily form.”31 Right feeling goes to the ear, not the eye, or, more accurately as Zarathustra wonders, one must learn to “listen with one’s eyes.” Indeed, and in consequence, the beginning of the philosophical mind, writes Nietzsche, comes in the amazement that becoming is the actuality of that which is ordinary. “The intellect must not wish only to enjoy this furtively but must become completely free and celebrate saturnalia. The liberated intellect looks clearly at things: and now, for the first time, the everyday appears to it as noteworthy, a problem.”32 At the end of “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” he will indicate that it is the glory of Wagner’s music to “enlighten the poor and lowly and melt the arrogance of the learned… [N]ow that it has come about, it must transform the very notion of education and culture in the spirit of everyone who experiences it; it will seem to him that a curtain has been raised on a future in which there are no longer any great and good things except those which all hearts share in common. The abuse (Schimpf) which has hitherto clung to the word ‘common’ will have then been removed from it.”33 Wagner was to be for everyone, at least in Nietzsche’s understanding.
Here again we have an insight into the nature of Nietzsche’s esoterism or elitism. One can think of elitism as corresponding to natural or acquired traits that some have, setting them above others. Or one can think of elitism in relation to the fact that “the mass of men” live, as Thoreau put it (1966: 5), “lives of quiet desperation,” and ask why this is the case. As Mark Twain noted once: “All of us have music and truth inside but most of us have a hard time getting it out” (quoted in Dolmetsch 1922: 73). In this case, the “elite” are those who can “get it out” – and the question becomes what it is about the world that keeps most people from doing so, or even thinking that they might be able to.
Political regrounding: the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music. As I noted at the outset, The Birth is about how, through the social, political, and cultural practice of the tragic festivals, the Greeks managed to “remain themselves,” that is, Greek. One of the key points of Nietzsche’s book (as Wilamowitz noticed in a footnote to the lengthy review in which he excoriated him) was a quiet questioning of Aristotle’s claim in the Poetics that the high point of tragedy came at the moment of anagnōrisis, the moment when the protagonist recognizes or finds himself for what he is.34 The paradigmatic moment for Aristotle occurs when Oedipus’ insight into who he is leads him to blind himself. It is as an attack on Aristotle’s idea of the self as something to be found by being seen that Nietzsche notes in the Genealogy that one should not rush about with one’s only intention being to “bring something back home,” a passage I take to be related to the implied critique of Aristotle which in turn I take to govern The Birth of Tragedy – Aristotle having held, in Nietzsche’s understanding, that who one was was something that would be revealed at home, and that one’s task, volens nolens, was to get back. So Oedipus recognizes himself at the end in the home of his parents, which, tragically, is also his home. Home, after all is “the place where, when you go there, they have to let you in” – which Robert Frost (1915: lines 121–2) noted as a tepid consolation of necessity in an absence of freedom.
Against Aristotle, Nietzsche argues that tragedy produces Verwandlung (transformation) rather than (self-)recognition. The self is not found but achieved; the picture is not that of turning around but of a path. Successful tragedy constitutes for Nietzsche the sealing of a change not so much in what one is, but in the naturalness by which one is able to deal with the historically evolving conditions that affect a culture (for example, PTG 1, WKG III.2: 302– 3). How might one achieve this? Such an ability first requires, paradoxically, the sense of an involved distance or objectivity from one’s own world. Nietzsche writes of an audience that, helpless in its seats, is, like the chorus on stage, unable to affect the course of the dramatic action and will thus not “run up and free the god from his torments.” As spectators, the audience is in the same inactive Dionysian state as is the chorus on stage. Nietzsche writes: “The process of the tragic chorus is the dramatic proto-phenomenon: to see oneself [as embodied in the chorus – TBS] transformed before one’s very eyes [as member of the audience – TBS] and to begin to act as if one had actually entered into another body, another character.”35
It is thus, he argues, that tragedy effects a cultural transformation in the citizen-spectators. As noted, a potential sub-title to the Birth from the fall of 1870 reads “Considerations on the ethical-political significance of musical drama” (WKG III.3: 106). Here it is important to realize that Nietzsche understood the Greek tragedies to be musical dramas themselves. The music was the language: ancient Greek was tonal – much of what we represent by accents marks corresponded to differences in pitch. Syllables are more or less fixed in length in relation to meter and, as Thrasybulos Georgiades notes (1982: 4–5), could neither “be extended nor abbreviated.” Anyone who has studied ancient Greek knows that there are a myriad of devices whereby meter is ensured.36 As West notes, “melody has a basis in an intrinsic feature of the [Greek] language. In every word there was one syllable which was given prominence over the others, not by stress (as in English and modern Greek) but in raised pitch” (West 1994: 198). Nietzsche places great emphasis on this (tragedy is after all born from “the spirit of music”) and it is for this that he hoped that a modern equivalent might be found in Wagner’s adaptation of the orchestra (Babich 2002, to whom I owe the ideas in this paragraph; Strong 2004).
This is, as I understand it, the central message in Heidegger’s analysis of the great choral ode in Antigone on the human. Heidegger calls attention to the person who is hupsipolis – which he translates as hochüberragend: standing high above, that is, not being part of the polis. The polis, as Heidegger understands it, is the “historical place, the There in which, from which and for which history happens.” To be above this – as a tyrant – is to be apolis. This is why philosophy tempered with and by tragedy could have led to a “tragic age of the Greeks” and to political health. The authentically agonistic political is the counter to nihilism (Heidegger 1976: 112–26, esp. 116–17). Nietzsche understood there to be a democracy of individuality in each member of the audience of a tragedy. Against Aristotle, Nietzsche argued that tragedy produces Verwandlung (transformation) and not (self-)recognition. The self is not found but achieved; the picture is not that of turning around but of a path. Successful tragedy constitutes for Nietzsche the sealing of a change not so much in what one is, but in the naturalness by which one is able to deal with the historically evolving conditions that affect a culture.
Tragedy is thus a form of political education that is available to all who could attend the performance. In this sense it is democratic, much in the manner that Nietzsche had thought possible for Wagner’s operas. What tragedy made available to the spectators was the experience of confronting two equally categorical positions (like those of Creon and Antigone) – this is the spectator on stage, as it were – and recognizing – this is the spectator seeing him or herself – that disaster comes when one or the other or both insist on being taken as final. Thus tragedy preserves the agōn – it shows the contingency of all victory. Nietzsche argues that the explorations of tragedy are made possible by the development of thought that he analyzes as “pre-Platonic.” One can say then that Nietzsche’s vision of the polis rests on an understanding of the political that is democratic in the sense that it is in principle available to all, but that he does not have a conception of politics that is democratic. Nietzsche is thus in agreement with Aristotle that humans are by nature political beings – and he was well aware that humans are not always naturally human. The politics of his time were increasingly democratic, in the sense of open to all. The introduction of universal male suffrage in France in 1848 and Germany in 1871 were harbingers of developments that he, like de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, foresaw as transforming the world. It gave rise to mass parties that, he thought, were incapable of debating issues coherently. Powerful interests, as he noted in the essay on The Greek State, distorted the common world. The question he opens here is as to whether or not democratic politics makes the democratic political of the kind that Aristotle understood as hard or impossible to maintain. This, however, opens up an area for research that has been only marginally surveyed.37 It confronts my country as I write.
DK | Diels, Hermann, and Walther Kranz (eds., trans.). 1961–4. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 2 vols. 11th and 12th eds. Berlin. |
WKG | Nietzsche, Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Berlin 1966ff. (for abbreviations of individual works see n. 4 above). |
Notes
1 See the interesting analysis by Ruehl 2003. See also several of the papers collected in Bishop 2004. The other essays included in the gift were I. “On the Pathos of Truth”; II. “Thoughts on the Future of Our Educational Institutions”; IV. “The Relationship of Schopenhauerian Philosophy to a German Culture”; V. “Homer’s Contest.”
2 The debate goes on. See Garlan 1988; Wood 1988; also Ober 1996: 24 n. 43 and 237–42.
3 See the argument in Strong 1988 (2000): ch. 8 with references.
4 Nietzsche, “The Greek State,” WKG III:2, 258–71. Citations from Nietzsche are to the Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe (WKG; Berlin, 1966 ff.). Material published by Nietzsche is cited by title, internal division, WKG book and volume, and page number. Material from the Nachlass is cited simply from WKG book and volume, and page number. The following key to the published work is used: Beyond Good and Evil (BGE); The Birth of Tragedy (BT) ; The Gay Science (GS); Human, All-too-Human (HAH), 2 vols.; On the Genealogy of Morals (GM); Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (PTG); Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z); Twilight of the Idols (TI); Untimely Meditations (UM) which includes “The Use and Misuse of History for Life” (HL), “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” (RWB), “Schopenhauer as Educator” (SE).
5 Thanks to Professor Babette Babich for a conversation on this point.
6 At least all adult male citizens. There is some debate about who else might attend; see Goldhill 1997 and Henderson 1991 for differing views.
7 Montesquieu gives a version of this when in the Persian Letters he understands tyranny as the unwillingness to allow anyone an existence other than that you permit (“Uzbek to Roxanne,” for example).
8 This is from an exchange between Leo Strauss and Kojève in Gourevitch and Roth 1991: 165–6. See also Strong 1996, 2005.
9 HAH I: 262, WKG IV.2: 222: “Homer.” — Die grösste Thatsache in der griechischen Bildung bleibt doch die, dass Homer so frühzeitig panhellenisch wurde. Alle geistige und menschliche Freiheit, welche die Griechen erreichten, geht auf diese Thatsache zurück. Aber zugleich ist es das eigentliche Verhängniss der griechischen Bildung gewesen, denn Homer verflachte, indem er centralisirte, und löste die ernsteren Instincte der Unabhängigkeit auf. Von Zeit zu Zeit erhob sich aus dem tiefsten Grunde des Hellenischen der Widerspruch gegen Homer; aber er blieb immer siegreich. Alle grossen geistigen Mächte üben neben ihrer befreienden Wirkung auch eine unterdrückende aus.
10 This was the subject of his inaugural lecture, “Homer and Classical Philology.” “We believe in a great poet as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey — but not that Homer was this poet.”
11 See PTG, WKG IV.1: 180–1. It is often overlooked that Nietzsche discusses all these things both in BT and GM as well as elsewhere.
12 “Homer’s Contest,” WKG III.2. 277: Will man recht unverhüllt jenes Gefühl in seinen naiven Äußerungen sehen, das Gefühl von der Nothwendigkeit des Wettkampfes, wenn anders das Heil des Staates bestehen soll, so denke man an den ursprünglichen Sinn des Ostrakismos: wie ihn z.B. die Ephesier, bei der Verbannung des Hermodor, aussprechen “Unter uns soll Niemand der Beste sein; ist Jemand es aber, so sei er anderswo und bei Anderen.” Denn weshalb soll Niemand der Beste sein? Weil damit der Wettkampf versiegen würde und der ewige Lebensgrund des hellenischen Staates gefährdet wäre. Später bekommt der Ostrakismos eine andre Stellung zum Wettkampfe: er wird angewendet, wenn die Gefahr offenkundig ist daß einer der großen um die Wette kämpfenden Politiker und Parteihäupter zu schädlichen und zerstörenden Mitteln und zu bedenklichen Staatsstreichen, in der Hitze des Kampfes, sich gereizt fühlt.
13 HAH I: 263, WKG IV.2: 223: “Begabung.” Jeder hat angeborenes Talent, aber nur Wenigen ist der Grad von Zähigkeit, Ausdauer, Energie angeboren und anerzogen, so dass er wirklich ein Talent wird, also wird, was er ist, das heisst: es in Werken und Handlungen entladet.
14 Nietzsche noteworthily leaves off mathōn. See the discussion in Babich 2006: 75–96.
15 One finds similar concerns in Vernant 1965; Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1990.
16 For a more detailed analysis see Strong 1988 (2000): 152–61, and ch. 6 passim. See also WKG III.4: 50, 84–5, 107, 117, 119–22, 142–4, 173–4, and WKG IV.1: 194–5.
17 So also will Nietzsche later proclaim himself a “European.”
18 Nietzsche gives this as “the world is a game of Zeus or, speaking physically, of fire with itself” (WKG III.2: 320). See BT, WKG III.1: 145.
19 I do not fantasize when I call attention to the fact that a modern attempt to make possible such a remarriage can be found in Cavell 1999.
20 Cavell 1984: 9. We might compare Heidegger’s understanding of the human as beings for whom their being is in question.
21 Compare the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles over Briseis in Book 2 with that between Menelaus and Antilochus over the relation between the order of victory and reward in the chariot race, as mediated by Achilles in Book 23.
22 BT ibid.: Zwischen Indien und Rom hingestellt und zu verführerischer Wahl gedrängt, ist es den Griechen gelungen, in classischer Reinheit eine dritte Form hinzuzuerfinden.
23 UM: HL 3, WKG III.1: 261 — Denn da wir nun einmal die Resultate früherer Geschlechter sind, sind wir auch die Resultate ihrer Verirrungen, Leidenschaften und Irrthümer, ja Verbrechen; es ist nicht möglich sich ganz von dieser Kette zu lösen. Wenn wir jene Verirrungen verurtheilen und uns ihrer für enthoben erachten, so ist die Thatsache nicht beseitigt, dass wir aus ihnen herstammen. Wir bringen es im besten Falle zu einem Widerstreite der ererbten, angestammten Natur und unserer Erkenntniss, auch wohl zu einem Kampfe einer neuen strengen Zucht gegen das von Alters her Angezogne und Angeborne, wir pflanzen eine neue Gewöhnung, einen neuen Instinct, eine zweite Natur an, so dass die erste Natur abdorrt. Es ist ein Versuch, sich gleichsam a posteriori eine Vergangenheit zu geben, aus der man stammen möchte, im Gegensatz zu der, aus der man stammt — immer ein gefährlicher Versuch, weil es so schwer ist eine Grenze im Verneinen des Vergangenen zu finden, und weil die zweiten Naturen meistens schwächlicher als die ersten sind. Es bleibt zu häufig bei einem Erkennen des Guten, ohne es zu thun, weil man auch das Bessere kennt, ohne es thun zu können. Aber hier und da gelingt der Sieg doch, und es giebt sogar für die Kämpfenden, für die, welche sich der kritischen Historie zum Leben bedienen, einen merkwürdigen Trost: nämlich zu wissen, dass auch jene erste Natur irgend wann einmal eine zweite Natur war und dass jede siegende zweite Natur zu einer ersten wird.
24 The term “cultural revolution” is originally Lenin’s (1977: 470–1, 474–5). Lenin owned and had read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.
25 UM: SE 5, WKG III.1: 378; UM: SE 7, WKG III.1: 401 (my italics). For discussion of this question in Nietzsche, see Cavell 1990: 49–54; Conant 2001; Mulhall 1994.
26 WKG III.1: 336. Nietzsche here is probably echoing the opening line of Emerson’s Experience [1979b:471]: “Where do we find ourselves?”
27 “Pulled out” here calls to mind Emerson’s discussion of “provocation” in 1979a: 79. Nietzsche’s language here parallels in content and intensity that of Emerson’s essay “Love” [1979c].
28 UM: RWB 5, WKG IV.1: 126: “[S]obald sie mit einander sich zu verständigen und zu einem Werke zu vereinigen suchen, erfasst sie der Wahnsinn der allgemeinen Begriffe, ja der reinen Wortklänge, und in Folge dieser Unfähigkeit, sich mitzutheilen, tragen dann wieder die Schöpfungen ihres Gemeinsinns das Zeichen des Sich-nicht-verstehens, insofern sie nicht den wirklichen Nöthen entsprechen, sondern eben nur der Hohlheit jener gewaltherrischen Worte und Begriffe: so nimmt die Menschheit zu allen ihren Leiden auch noch das Leiden der Convention hinzu, das heisst des Uebereinkommens in Worten und Handlungen ohne ein Uebereinkommen des Gefühls.” Nietzsche echoes a thought in Wagner’s Opera and Drama. See Wagner (no date): 18, 132.
29 Note: I read “die in Liebe verwandelte Natur” not as “nature transformed into love.”
30 Ibid. 33. The entire passage is: “Denn die unrichtige Empfindung reitet und drillt sie unablässig und lässt durchaus nicht zu, dass sie sich selber ihr Elend eingestehen dürfen; wollen sie sprechen, so flüstert ihnen die Convention etwas in’s Ohr, worüber sie vergessen, was sie eigentlich sagen wollten; wollen sie sich mit einander verständigen, so ist ihr Verstand wie durch Zaubersprüche gelähmt, so dass sie Glück nennen, was ihr Unglück ist, und sich zum eigenen Unsegen noch recht geflissentlich mit einander verbinden. So sind sie ganz und gar verwandelt und zu willenlosen Sclaven der unrichtigen Empfindung herabgesetzt.”
31 RWB 7, WKG IV.1: 38: “In Wagner will ebenso alles Hörbare der Welt auch als Erscheinung für das Auge an’s Licht hinaus und hinauf, will gleichsam Leiblichkeit gewinnen.” For a discussion of seeing and hearing in Nietzsche, see Babich 2002.
32 “Die vorplatonischen Philosophen” (1869), WKG II.4: 215. “Der Intellekt muss nicht nur sich verstohlen ergötzen wollen, er muss völlig frei geworden sein u. Saturnalien feiern. Der freigewordene Intellekt schaut die Dinge an: und jetzt zum ersten Male erscheint ihm das Alltägliche beachtenswerth, als ein Problem.” This is then said to be the true marker of the philosophical drive.
33 RWB 10, WKG IV.1: 75–76. “Aber im Geiste eines Jeden, der es jetzt erfährt, muss es alle Begriffe über Erziehung und Cultur umwenden; ihm wird der Vorhang vor einer Zukunft aufgezogen scheinen, in welcher es keine höchsten Güter und Beglückungen mehr giebt, die nicht den Herzen Aller gemein sind. Der Schimpf, welcher bisher dem Worte‚ gemein’ anklebte, wird dann von ihm hinweggenommen sein.”
34 Wilamowitz 2000 (1872): 32 n. 52, though he focuses on Nietzsche’s downplaying of hamartia (accident, mistake, wrongdoing, error, sin). See also Nietzsche GS 80, WKG V.2: 111: “Aristotle… certainly did not hit the nail on the head when he discussed the ultimate end of Greek tragedy.” Aristotle writes the Poetics well after the high point of Greek tragedy.
35 BT 8, WKG III.1: 53. Dieser Prozess des Tragödienchors ist das dramatische Urphänomen: sich selbst vor sich verwandelt zu sehen und jetzt zu handeln, als ob man wirklich in einen andern Leib, in einen andern Charakter eingegangen wäre. For a full discussion, see Strong 1988 (2000): 161–82.
36 See, for instance, the rules in Pharr 1985: 180–94, albeit without reference to anything beyond “metrical requirements.”
37 See, among others, Arp 2006; Sparisou 1991: esp. ch. 2; Rehm 2002, and the proceedings of a conference on “Tragedy and Archaic Greek Thought” that was held at the University of Edinburgh in June 2008. (http://www.shc.ed.ac.uk/conferences/tragedy08/prog.html).
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