# Nietzsche the thinker/Chapter IV

FIRST PERIOD
CHAPTER IV
GENERAL VIEW OF THE WORLD; THE FUNCTION OF ART
I
In passing to the detailed study of Nietzsche's intellectual history, we begin with him in Basel, where he is professor of classical philology at the University. He is happy in his relations with his colleagues, and as a teacher he is uncommonly beloved. Professor Rudolph Eucken, for a time his colleague, recalls his "kind and pleasant manner" in examining students for the doctor's degree, "without in any way impairing the strict demands of the subject-matter." Jacob Burckhardt, another colleague and well-known for his writings on the Renaissance and Greek culture, remarked at the time that Basel had never before had a teacher like him. Nietzsche is particularly happy in his intercourse with Burckhardt, who was much his senior. He is also happy in a friendship with Richard Wagner, with whom and Frau Cosima he often spends delightful week-ends at their villa above Lake Lucerne. His lectures are strictly professional, and only the few devoted to philological study attend them.
At the same time his interests are wide, and he finds himself wishing to do more than train efficient philologists. The root-problems of life and the world engage him. He has at bottom the philosophical instinct, and philological study becomes more or less a means to its satisfaction. Greek philology opens for him the door to Greek thought and speculation—enables him, he thinks, to reconstruct more accurately than would otherwise be possible the Greek view of life. The broader outlook appears in a preliminary way in his inaugural address, "Homer and Classical Philology," and it bore rich fruit in his ​first published book, The Birth of Tragedy. It shows itself also in fragmentary minor studies—meant apparently for use in a work on Hellenism in general—on the Greek state, the Greek woman, competitive strife in Homer, philosophy in the tragic period of the Greeks (i.e., the pre-Socratic philosophers), all of which now appear in his published Remains. In addition, he writes two brief but pregnant studies of a more general character—one in æsthetics, "On the Relation between Music and Words," another in the theory of knowledge, "On Truth and Falsehood in the Extra-moral Sense." Aside from all this, he brings his ideas to bear on questions or tendencies of the day, and sometimes makes a decided stir in the intellectual world. It was so with a pamphlet attack on David Friedrich Strauss—and, though not so markedly, with pamphlets on "The Use and Harm of History for Life," "Schopenhauer as Educator," and "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth." He calls them Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, recognizing that the views he expresses are not in harmony with the spirit of the time. The new Germany after the Franco-Prussian war did not please him—it was too self-satisfied, materialistic, Philistine: the spirit was spreading to the educated classes, and even infected the veteran theologian Strauss. Philosophy was losing its old distinctive character—giving way to history, criticism, scientific specialism. The cause of Wagner, which to his mind held such rich promise for the future, was having to struggle. Education was being perverted. He gave several public lectures on the latter topic and outlined more. Notes of this course and memoranda for still another Unzeitgemässe Betrachtung, "We Philologists," make, along with the books and pamphlets already mentioned and some private notes, the literary output of his first period.
I shall now endeavor to state the general background of thought and feeling in these writings, and I shall follow the same method in dealing with the later epochs of his life. I am aware that in restricting myself in this way, I do more or less violence to Nietzsche. He was above all a creature of flesh and blood, and from my skeleton manner of treatment the reader will get little idea of the richness and varied charm of his concrete thinking. But my purpose is a limited one, and perhaps ​all philosophy, or study of philosophy, is bound to be "grau" compared with "Lebens Farbe."
II
First, I may note that Nietzsche gives a distinct place to philosophy. It is not for him merely a vague general term, but has a special meaning. The philosopher is distinct from the scholar or man of science, as well as from the average unthinking run of men; he is also distinct from the reformer. His impulse is that of theoretic curiosity, but the curiosity is not as to anything and everything, a mere blind undiscriminating appetite for knowledge turned loose on the universe; it is curiosity as to things most important, the things worthiest of knowledge. In other words, in philosophy is already implicit the notion of value, and the philosopher is ipso facto a judge. He is differentiated from the scholar as well as the ordinary practical man in that he seeks the great knowledge—the knowledge of the essence and core of things, of the total meaning and tune of the world; his effort is to give an echo to this tune and state it in conceptual form. "Great" here is determined by the situation of man, the general character and circumstances of his life. As to this, Nietzsche felt much as Pascal had. Round about man, the heir of a few hours, there are frightful precipices and every step brings up the questions, Wherefore? Whither? Whence? Philosophy is an answer—an attempt at an answer—to these questions; hence its rank. It is above the special sciences—is indeed their ultimate raison d'être and the judge of their importance. Nietzsche is keenly conscious from the start of the subordinate rank of scientific specialism—as against the tendency to exalt it current in Germany at the time. Nor at first does he seem to doubt that philosophical truth can be got. At the same time, the philosopher is thinker, judge, legislator, not practical reformer.
The general conception of the world which Nietzsche first reached, however, is different from what most of us are accustomed to, and repels rather than attracts. We think—at least most of us try to think—of reason and intelligence as governing ​the world, of justice as its law, and of love as its driving force. But Nietzsche is unable to make out either a rational or a moral government of things. Change and undoing overtake all things, even the best and rarest: what is excellent is no more permanent than anything else. The world seems to him chiefly a blind striving of will, or rather of wills—wills, too, which strive with one another (save within certain limits) and more or less live off one another. He finds little that is worshipful or adorable in such a world (whether as it appears or as it inwardly is). Aside from awe before its vastness, it rather awakens pity. In reaching this result Kant's negative arguments against theology had affected him, but it was the concrete make-up of the world that was the decisive thing—especially what Darwin has brought home to us English-speaking people, and what Schopenhauer had noted decades before. The "horrible struggle for existence" is often referred to. The world was undivine. Nietzsche even speaks of this later as if it had been a first-hand independent conviction with him—of atheism as conducting him to Schopenhauer. If so, Schopenhauer simply did him the service of formulating and grounding his conviction—i.e., of tracing back to their ultimate metaphysical origin the pain and wrong of the world, the general contradictoriness and impermanence of things.
III
How did Nietzsche react to such a view practically? Careful attention to his various early writings seems to reveal two attitudes—taken either at successive times, or, according to his mood, more or less at the same time. The reaction that came first (if there was a first) was like Schopenhauer's own. He wished to renounce life, felt pity to be the supreme law, even inclined to practical asceticism—and with it all had the dim sense of another order of things than this we know, one to which the negation of life somehow conducts. There are several passages of this tenor. The other reaction was strongly contrasted—it was a disposition to accept life and the world, even if they were undivinely constituted. Why this one came to predominate, it might be hard to say. One consideration and ​another may have influenced him; but probably at bottom it was for a reason below or beyond reason—because the life-instinct (will to live) imperiously asserted itself in him.
This affirmation of life in face of an irrational and unmoral world comes to be one of the most distinctive things in Nietzsche and should be noticed with some care. It is, of course, totally different from the cheerful acceptance of life which the Christian or the pious theist makes—different also from the temperamental optimism which simply looks on the bright side of things, different even from the meliorism which looks for better and better things. Nietzsche, now at least, looks for no radical improvement, whether in the world at large or in the fundamental conditions of human life. The poignant thing is, that our life, like all other life, exists and maintains itself by violence and wrong. We rob other things of existence that we ourselves may live, as truly as animals do—the best of us are parties to this violence, the very saint could not live off the inorganic elements; if for a single day the race should really hold all life sacred, touching or despoiling nothing, it would straightway come to an end. That is, Leben und Morden ist eins—living and killing are one. Yes, the higher ranges of human life exist by more or less despoiling the lower ranges. Culture "rests on a horrible foundation." It is only possible with leisure, and leisure for some means that others must work more than their share—and those who work for others' benefit rather than their own and have to, are really slaves. The culture of ancient Greece—the fairest the world has known—rested on literal slavery; essentially it is always so, is so today, though we may veil the fact from our eyes by speaking of "free contract."
And yet to accept life on these terms is not easy and involves inner suffering. Some may feel that culture and the higher ranges of life are not worth the price that has to be paid for them—that if all cannot rise, it is better that none should. Indeed, the feeling may go deeper still, it may extend to the foundations of life itself—if life is necessarily of the general predatory nature described, we may think it better to be done with it altogether. So felt Schopenhauer, and so, at moments at least, Nietzsche. But a deeper impulse—something wild and ​unmoral, if you will—urged him finally the other way. He took, chose life, even at this cost.
IV
The problem of the easement of existence, however, under conditions like these becomes a pressing one. And here Nietzsche discovers a vital significance in art. Art is a kind of playing with the world; it consists in seeing it—in part or in toto—as in a play, making a picture or spectacle of it. So far as we follow this impulse, we disembarrass ourselves of ourselves and the world as immediate experience, and view everything as outside us, detached from us—we contemplate rather than experience, even the terrible we can look upon undisturbed. That is, the burden of actual life is momentarily lifted, and we may even enjoy rather than suffer. We may enjoy, though what we see would undo us, were it part of actual experience. It is Schopenhauer's doctrine over again. Still earlier Goethe had stated the essential principle of it:
"Was im Leben uns verdriesst Man im Bilde gern geniesst."
Nietzsche clings to it now. Art is not a fanciful thing to him, a luxury—it meets a vital need: by it we are helped to go on living. Not only the thinker, the highly organized nature has this need,—all who suffer experience it, and particularly the great laborious mass, too easily tempted to insurrection or to suicide.
V
Nietzsche preoccupations are now with old Greek life, and he borrows illustrations for his view of art largely from this field. Particularly does he attend to the religious festivals and the tragic drama. His view of the undertone of life among the Greeks, it should at once be said, is novel—at least to those of us who have our ideas chiefly from Winckelmann and Goethe, and think of "the light gracefulness of the old Greek paganism" (Carlyle), or of their moral and religious life sitting ​"easily upon them like their own graceful garments" (John Fiske). A recent writer even says, "The ancient Greeks seem to have been incapable of taking life seriously." But how do views of this sort agree with the spirit of the answer which the legendary Silenus gave to King Midas's question as to what is best for man? "Pitiful race of a day, children of accident and sorrow, why do you force me to say what were best left unheard? The best of all is unobtainable—not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. The second best is early to die." Yet the answer long lived in Greek tradition, and the substance of thought underlying it is repeated by Simonides and by Sophocles. Indeed, how do the common views harmonize with Pindar's somber tone in speaking of the soul as being here in a mortal body because of ancient guilt—or with the ascetic tendencies which we discover in the Orphic cults and in Pythagoreanism? From considerations of this nature, Nietzsche was led to conclude that there was an undertone of profound seriousness and even of pessimism among the ancient, particularly most ancient, Greeks (those before Socrates), and Burckhardt substantially agreed with this view when he characterized the Greek spirit as pessimism in world-view, optimism in temperament. It was then against a somber background that the art of the Greeks had arisen; indeed, Nietzsche held that it was in part just because they suffered as they did, because they felt with such particular keenness the anomalous and problematical in existence, that their art grew to its extraordinary and unique proportions.
His view of Greek art, and particularly of the tragic drama, is of such interest, and hangs together so closely with his general philosophical view, that I shall give some details.
The art-impulse which has been described he designates as the Apollinic impulse. Apollo, we remember, was a God of dreams, and under this impulse we see things as in a dream, i.e., detached from real experience. According to Lucretius ​the Gods first appeared to men in dreams, and Nietzsche regarded the Olympian family of deities as a kind of detached glorified vision of the commanding, powerful, and splendid elements in Greek life. They were hardly divine, in our sense of that term, that is, embodiments of justice, holiness, purity—any one who approaches the Homeric pantheon with Christian feelings, he remarks, is bound to be disappointed. The Greek rather saw in that immortal company himself over again and what was great, both good and evil, in his own life and experience, including the contradictions and tragic elements. Religion itself was to this extent like art—and it had the emancipating, relieving, reassuring influence of art. The Gods, Nietzsche says sententiously, justified human life by living it themselves—the "only satisfying theodicy." There were besides epic narrative and sculpture and painting, all coming from the same picture-making impulse. The things narrated or represented might have elements of terror in them, but when thus projected and separated from actual experience, the main feelings in witnessing them were of wonder and admiration. This would be the case, even if they corresponded in every single form and lineament to the realities they reproduced. Indeed, this kind of art observed the metes and bounds, the definite outlines and forms, of the actual world most scrupulously.
But there was another art-impulse, to which Nietzsche gives the name Dionysiac—it is so much "another," that we may hardly see the propriety of calling it an art-impulse at all. Nietzsche's description of it is colored by Schopenhauerian metaphysics, and is not easy to follow for those who are not versed in the latter; but I shall try to make his meaning clear. Dionysus, as is well known, was outside the Olympian circle of divinities. His worship (the rites in his honor) was of an altogether peculiar character. It was not sober, orderly, and decorous, observing metes and bounds, like the worship of Apollo and Zeus, but a more or less riotous thing. There was dancing, and the music of the flute which accompanied it was very different from the music of Apollo's lyre. Exaltation ​came to the worshipers, a sense of oneness with the God, who was imitated in extraordinary acts; the lines which divide human beings from one another and from the animal world were for the moment obliterated, the feeling of separate individuality vanished, and a sense of universal kinship took its place. It was a state of semi-intoxication, often literal intoxication—Dionysus was secondarily, if not primarily, a God of the vine, and ancient peoples, it must be remembered, often regarded drunkenness as a divinely inspired condition. This was the joyous side of the Dionysian festival. But the joy was of a peculiar sort. It was over against a background that of itself would have bred melancholy and dejection. Dionysus was a God of change, a God of the destruction involved in change as well as of production and fertility, a hunter (Zagreus) bent on slaying, a devourer, a flesh-eater (sarcophagus or ὠμοστἠς); yes, he was himself a suffering God and the dithyramb, or hymn in his honor, sang his mystical woes. The joy of the festival was a joy following gloom—and this is the explanation of the excesses that marked it, its orgiastic traits. The winter revealed the God destroying, the spring came as a revelation of his creative power—and the spring was the time of his festival. The worshipers shared both in his pain and his pleasure, identified themselves with the whole round of his life—on the one hand, fasting, hunting, devouring the flesh of wild animals; on the other, dancing, reveling, and re-enacting his creative fertility. It is evident that Dionysus, so taken, was a sort of epitome of life itself, a symbol of the world of change in general, and Nietzsche thinks that his worship had hence the highest significance, since it amounted to a reaffirmation of life in all its range, and a mystical identification of the worshiper with the very spirit of it. In a striking passage he sums up the Dionysiac experience, substantially as follows: We know that everything that arises must await a painful end, we face the terrors of individual existence and yet are not benumbed, for a metaphysical consolation lifts us above the wheel of change; for a brief moment we become the Primal Being (Urwesen) himself and feel his uncontrollable desire for and joy in existence; the struggle, the pain, the destruction attending all phenomena, seem even necessary in view of the innumerable forms ​ever pressing and pushing into life, the boundless fertility of the World-Will; at the very moment in which we are stung by the pain, we share also in the immeasurable creative pleasure; and so, despite fear and pity, we are happy and kept to life.
The Dionysiac experience is evidently very different from that of the Apollinic dreamer and seer, and the question is, what has it to do with art at all? Nietzsche says that the Dionysiac man is an art-work, not an artist. For he is not so much looking at life as in a picture and finding relief in detaching it from himself, as entering it afresh, re-experiencing its joy and its pain, saying yes even to what is tragic in it. In short, the Apollinic type man looks on life, the Dionysiac relives it. The truth is, the Dionysiac experience is material for art, it is a subject that may be artistically treated—and this is what Nietzsche really (or logically) means, the justification for his speaking of a second art-impulse being simply that the material has been so used. For out of the Dionysian festival grew that supreme form of Greek art, the tragic drama; this may be briefly characterized as an Apollinic treatment of the Dionysiac experience—a marriage of the two. If we fancy to ourselves a worshiper, who has wandered off from the rest in his intoxication and mystic self-oblivion, sinking to the ground for a moment, and, as he lies there, seeing himself and his rapt state and union with the God as in a dream, we have the Dionysiac experience and the rudiments of an Apollinic vision united in the same person. It is just such a blending of diverse elements that lies, Nietzsche thinks, at the basis of Greek tragedy. The chorus, as is commonly recognized, was the essential feature of the drama, and the chorus is really a transformed band of Dionysus worshipers. They are satyrs, even as the original worshipers dressed themselves in wild costumes to imitate the God. The action on their part is entirely song and dance—the dialogue is an addition, and it is something in which they have no part. The song is really a transformation of the original dithyramb, "the beautiful song of Dionysus," as Archilochus called it. According to what Nietzsche deems incontestable tradition, the sole subject of Greek tragedy in its very earliest form was the sufferings of ​Dionysus. He thinks that even when Prometheus and Œdipus appear on the stage, they are only a kind of mask for the original divine hero. I will not go further into details. The essential point in Nietzsche's interpretation is that the suffering and triumphing God (or world, or man—at bottom all are the same) is seen in vision and becomes a subject of art. The art, however, quite differs from the epos or any form of Apollinic art. The rhapsodist, equally with the painter and sculptor, sees his images outside himself. But in Dionysiac art, the artist and even the spectators of the drama imaginatively identify themselves with, and become a part of, that which they see. All are for the moment participants in the divine drama spread out before their eyes.
In these ways, then, according to Nietzsche, the Greeks were helped to live, in face of the tragic facts of the world. One kind of art projected existence in a picture—and there came not only relief, but happiness in contemplating it. Another more daring kind led men, as it were, to live existence over again, to reaffirm even the tragedy in it—change, suffering, death—as a part of the eternal round. This was the most powerful and moving kind of art—in it the Greek found his supreme redemption from practical pessimism. Under the shadow of the Olympian deities, in the presence of great works of plastic art, but above all under the influence of the Dionysian festival and the tragic drama, the pain of existence was transcended, and life ennobled.
* ↑ Werke (pocket ed.), I, xxviii.
* ↑ "David Strauss, Confessor and Author," sect. 8.
* ↑ "Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 3.
* ↑ Ecce Homo, III, ii, § 2.
* ↑ Cf. P. J. Möbius, op. cit., p. 58.
* ↑ Werke, IX, 153.
* ↑ Ibid., IX, 151.
* ↑ Birth of Tragedy, sects. 22, 24, 25.
* ↑ The data are in The Birth of Tragedy, to which (dispensing with special references, save in a few cases) I refer the reader. The whole of it should be read, and reread, by one who really wishes to get Nietzsche’s point of view—or, I might say, to have an initiation into his way of thinking in general; and I regret to have to say that it should be read in the original—or at least in the French translation.
* ↑ It was in visions and dreams that the Hebrew God appeared to men—particularly to prophets (cf. Numbers, xii, 6).
* ↑ Cf. also Genealogy of Morals, II, § 23.
* ↑ Cf. also Erwin Rohde, Psyche, II, 15.