Nietzsche Truth, Value, Tragedy
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Nietzsche Harries 1 Karsten Harries Nietzsche Truth, Value, Tragedy Seminar Notes Spring Semester 2015 Yale University Copyright Karsten Harries Nietzsche Harries 2 Contents 1. Introduction: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Wagner 3 2. "On the Pathos of Truth" I 32 3. “On the Pathos of Truth" II 45 4. "On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense" I 59 5. "On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense" I 76 6. Artisten-Metaphysik 87 7. Apollo and Dionysus 102 8. Socrates 119 9. Incipit Tragoedia 132 10. Old and New Values 146 11. The Problem of Time 154 12. The Eternal Recurrence 168 13. Conclusion: Tragedy and Redemption 186 Nietzsche Harries 3 1. Introduction: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Wagner 1 In the 19th century the traditional Platonic-Christian conception of human being underwent a revolution in which we are still caught up and with which we still have to come to terms. Darwin is one name often mentioned in this connection, Marx another, Freud a third. In this seminar I would like to examine some aspects and consequences of this revolution by taking a look at some of Nietzsche's writings. This examination will focus on three themes, truth, value, and tragedy. My discussion will end with a consideration of Zarathustra,1 but much of it will be concerned with Nietzsche’s early writings, especially The Birth of Tragedy. To introduce that discussion I shall begin, however, by taking a careful look at two short essays dating from that period, at "The Pathos of Truth," dating from 1872, and "On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense," dating from the following year.2 More clearly than The Birth of Tragedy3 these essays allow us to understand the nature of Nietzsche's philosophical project, his life-long struggle with nihilism. They also underscore his debt to Schopenhauer and I am convinced, notwithstanding what commentators such as Heidegger and Kaufmann have suggested, that without consideration of that debt there can be no adequate understanding of Nietzsche, and more especially of Nietzsche’s understanding of truth, value, and tragedy. 2 Before turning to the two essays next time and to introduce the topic of this seminar I would like to anticipate and take a brief first look at The Birth of Tragedy. 1 References in the text are to Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1954). Abbreviated PN. 2 References in the text are to Daniel Breazeale, Philosophy and Truth: Selections From Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1970's, (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1979). Abbreviated PT. 3 References in the text are to are to Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy” and “The Case of Wagner,” trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967). Abbreviated BT. Nietzsche Harries 4 Written at the time of the Franco-Prussian War, the book is of course much more than the title suggests: not just an inquiry into the birth of tragedy, but also an analysis of its death; also an analysis of our own plight, which Nietzsche links to that death; and a call for a rebirth of tragedy, a rebirth that, Nietzsche then thought, was already announcing itself in Wagner's music drama, where such a rebirth would inevitably usher in a postmodern culture. As is well known, Nietzsche blames the death of Attic tragedy on the poet Euripides. But behind Euripides stands Socrates. In blaming Socrates Nietzsche is not so much attacking the historical Socrates as a tendency that he takes to be both life denying and fundamental to our modern culture. Nietzsche’s Socrates is a construct that figures Descartes even as it draws on material taken from Plato, Xenophon and especially Aristophanes. Key to our spiritual situation is a naïve trust in the power of reason to lead us to the only life worth living: The most acute word, however, about this new and unprecedented value set on knowledge and insight was spoken by Socrates when he found that he was the only one who acknowledged to himself that he knew nothing, whereas in his critical peregrinations through Athens he had called on the greatest statesmen, orators, poets, and artists, and had everywhere discovered the conceit of knowledge. To his astonishment he perceived that all these celebrities were without a proper and sure insight, even with regard to their own professions, and that they practiced them only by instinct. "Only by instinct": with this phrase we touch upon the heart and core of the Socratic tendency. With it Socratism condemns existing art as well as existing ethics. Wherever Socratism turns its searching eyes it sees lack of insight and the power of illusion; and from this lack it infers the essential perversity and reprehensibility of what exists. Basing himself on this point, Socrates conceives it to be his duty to correct existence: all alone, with an expression of irreverence and superiority, as the precursor of an altogether different culture, art, and morality, he enters a world, to touch whose very hem would give us the greatest happiness. (BT 87) Nietzsche Harries 5 3 Nietzsche calls the Greeks the chariot-drivers of every subsequent culture. (BT 94) Socrates is one of these, indeed the most important, for he is the model of the theoretical man. In order to vindicate the dignity of such a leader's position for Socrates, too, it is enough to recognize in him a type of existence unheard of before him: the type of the theoretical man whose significance and aim it is our next task to try to understand. Like the artist, the theoretical man finds an infinite delight in whatever exists, and this satisfaction protects him against the practical ethics of pessimism with its Lynceus eyes that shine only in the dark. Whenever the truth is uncovered, the artist will always cling with rapt gaze to what still remains covering even after such uncovering; but the theoretical man enjoys and finds satisfaction in the discarded covering and finds the highest object of his pleasure in the process of an ever happy uncovering that succeeds through his own efforts. (BT 94) Art is content with appearance. It lets it be. This ability to let what appears be, presupposes a certain renunciation. The artist does not insist on being, as Descartes put it, the master and possessor of nature. So understood all genuine art is attended by an aura of tragedy. It is born of the recognition that we human beings lack the power to so master reality that we are able to secure our existence. Science, on the other hand, wants to seize and possess reality, failing to recognize the human being's final impotence. Science covers up that impotence. Over its progress presides thus the profound illusion that first saw the light of the world in the person of Socrates: the unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of causality, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being, but even of correcting it. (BT 95) Nietzsche understands modern science and even more our technology as the triumph of the Socratic understanding of reality. The human capacity to know is here made the measure of reality. What is real is equated with what we can grasp or comprehend. But we can grasp and comprehend only what has a certain hardness and endures. Being thus Nietzsche Harries 6 comes to be understood in opposition to time. But if, as Nietzsche is convinced, reality and temporality cannot be divorced, then a metaphysics that thinks being against time, even as it claims to seize the essence of reality, has to alienate us from reality. That Nietzsche's Socrates should resemble Descartes is no surprise. 4 Nietzsche’s Socrates is an optimist. He believes in the power of reason to lead us to that happiness of which we human beings are capable. “Hence the image of the dying Socrates, as the human being whom knowledge and reasons have liberated from the fear of death, is the emblem that, above the entrance gate to science, reminds all of its mission — namely, to make existence appear comprehensible and thus justified.” (BT 96) Promising a conquest of the fear of death, the image of the dying Socrates promises also the conquest of the egoism that supports such fear, an egoism that has to lead to pessimism, as Schopenhauer had shown to Nietzsche's satisfaction. By contrast with this practical pessimism, Socrates is the prototype of the theoretical optimist who, with his faith that the nature of things can be fathomed, ascribes to knowledge and to insight the power of a panacea, while understanding error as the evil par excellence. To fathom the depths and to separate true knowledge from appearance and error, seemed to Socratic man the noblest, even the only human vocation. And since Socrates, this mechanism of concepts, judgments, and inferences has been esteemed as the highest occupation and as the most admirable gift of nature, above all other capacities. Even the most sublime ethical deeds, the stirrings of pity, self-sacrifice, heroism, and that calm sea of the soul, so difficult to attain, which the Apollinian Greek called sophrosune, were derived from the dialectic of knowledge by Socrates and his like-minded successors, down to the present, and accordingly designated as teachable. (BT 97) But this optimistic confidence in reason's power to grasp the essence of reality and to guide human beings to happiness must in the end undermine itself. Reason itself calls such optimism into question, and here Nietzsche is thinking first of all of Kant and Schopenhauer as critics of the claims of reason.