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ABSTRACT
Nietzsche’s interest in tragedy continues throughout his work. And yet scholarship on Nietzsche’s account of tragedy has focused almost exclusively on his first book, The Birth of Tragedy – a work which is in many ways discontinuous with his more mature philosophical views. In this paper, I aim to illuminate Nietzsche’s post-Birth of Tragedy views on tragedy by setting them in the context of a particular historical conversation. Ever since Plato banished the tragic poets from the kallipolis, various philosophers have attempted to respond to his challenge to offer a ‘defense of poetry’. What Nietzsche offers, I argue, is a distinctive form of response to Plato’s challenge. I show how Nietzsche takes seriously Plato’s worries, and even ends up in partial agreement with him: tragedy is not (unqualifiedly) valuable; it can be spiritually dangerous. Key to Nietzsche’s account is a distinction he draws between two types of tragic audience. For the ‘lower types’, tragedy is – as Plato feared – dangerous. For the ‘higher types’, however, tragedy can act as a regenerative force. Finally, I discuss a distinctive form of value that tragedy makes available to a modern audience: tragedy can act as a stimulus towards the process of the revaluation of values.
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Notes
1 EH, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, 4. I use the following abbreviations for Nietzsche's texts: The Birth of Tragedy – BT; Human, All Too Human – HAH; Daybreak – D; The Gay Science – GS; Thus Spoke Zarathustra – Z; Beyond Good and Evil – BGE; On the Genealogy of Morality – GM; Twilight of the Idols – TI; The Antichrist – A; Ecce Homo – EH. All translations are from the ‘Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy’ editions of Nietzsche’s published works, with some minor adjustments. Quotations from Plato’s Republic are from the Grube/Reeve translation.
2 Ibid, 3.
3 For example: HAH 1:166, 1:212; D 78, 172; GS 1, 23, 80, 135, 153, 342, 382; Z ‘On Chastity’, ‘The Convalescent’, ‘On Reading and Writing’, BGE 25, 30, 150, 229, 239; A 7; TI ‘Reason in Philosophy’, ‘Skirmishes’ 24, ‘What I Owe the Ancients’.
4 The extensive investigation in Silk and Stern’s Nietzsche on Tragedy (Citation1981), for instance, is focused entirely on BT.
5 ‘An Attempt at Self-Criticism’, added to BT in 1886.
6 A few pieces of scholarship do buck the trend. I discuss Amy Price’s (Citation1998) in section 6. A further piece of interest is Aaron Ridley’s (Citation2019) (see also (Young Citation1992) for related discussion). Here, Ridley offers an analysis of a passage from TI in which Nietzsche discusses the psychology of the experience of tragedy, and its relationship to life-affirmation. Ridley’s point, however, is that in this passage we see Nietzsche returning, regrettably, to metaphysical ideas reminiscent of his BT-era views – ideas that he ought, given some of his mature philosophical commitments, to have long since abandoned. The question I shall be considering, then, is whether the mature Nietzsche, when he is not being swept up in ill-advised flights of metaphysical fancy, has anything interesting to say to us about tragedy; I shall be arguing that he does.
7 See the Ion and the Philebus, for instance.
8 The precise target of Plato’s attacks is difficult to pin down clearly. This is in part because Plato’s concept of ‘poetry’ is somewhat broader than ours, and takes as its primary instance not written pieces but rather works that were performed in public, including in the context of tragic (and comic) plays. Things are complicated further by the fact that the arguments posed at various places in the Republic and other texts seem to take aim at somewhat different objects. However, it seems to be the epic poets and the tragedians who stand as the main target of Plato’s attacks. The most frequently named target is Homer, whom Socrates describes as ‘the most poetic of the tragedians and the first among them’ (Republic 607a).
9 This is, I should acknowledge, a contentious reading of the Poetics. The notion of katharsis in particular has been the focus of much disagreement, with some authors claiming that the term itself is a result of a corruption of the text, and should be excised. See Halliwell (Citation2009) for a survey of ways the notion has been interpreted, and Scott (Citation2003), Veloso (Citation2008) for considerations concerning the inclusion of the term in the text. What matters ultimately for my purposes will be how Nietzsche understands Aristotle’s account of tragedy; I discuss this in section 4.
10 In section 6, I introduce an important caveat to this point.
11 Martha Nussbaum highlights the Stoics’ fondness for metaphors of ‘hardness’ and ‘softness’ (Nussbaum Citation1994, 146).
12 Nussbaum (Citation1994) interprets Nietzsche’s attacks on pity as resurrecting Stoic objections. (She is not here directly concerned with the role of tragedy in Nietzsche’s work – and of course the Stoic relationship to tragedy is itself complex.)
13 In fact, Nussbaum appears to acknowledge something close to this (Nussbaum Citation1994, 158). She concludes, however, that there is a deep tension within Nietzsche’s thought, between what she sees as his strongly Stoic commitments to self-sufficiency and the unimportance of external goods, on the one hand, and his emphasis on the fact that human beings are ultimately bodily creatures (thus, she notes, subject to all kinds of misfortune that lie beyond our control) on the other. But I think Nussbaum is mistaken to see a tension here, for the latter commitments are, I think, sufficient to undermine the strongly Stoic reading she offers in the first place. The textual evidence that she raises shows that Nietzsche shares many of the Stoic’s conclusions about pity – that it can involve contempt, that it is an expression of weakness, that it is egoistic, and that it is connected to revenge. She then infers that Nietzsche’s reasons for viewing pity in these ways must be the same as those of the Stoics – centrally, the idea that pity rests on false beliefs that accord a high value to external goods, when in fact the only way a person can genuinely suffer harm is through her own choices. But there is no need to think that Nietzsche’s Stoic-sounding conclusions rest on such underlying Stoic commitments, and overwhelming reason to think that he rejects such commitments. Thus, the reading of Nietzsche as offering straightforwardly Stoic objections to pity cannot be supported.
14 This part of the attacks on pity has been largely overlooked, but it appears as a recurring theme in Z, for instance.
15 See (Von Tevenar Citation2007) for some interesting discussion.
16 See also Nietzsche’s explicit rejection of an ‘art pour l’art’ philosophy at TI, Skirmishes, 24.
17 And with that of someone like Tolstoy, who in What Is Art? similarly appears to take it for granted that the relevant terms of assessment for artistic works are ethical ones.
18 More recently, Malcolm Budd (Citation1997) argues in a similar spirit that the value of a work of art (or anyway its value ‘as a work of art’) is not a matter of its effects, including psychological-moral effects on the viewer, but is rather a matter of the intrinsic value of the aesthetic experience that the work offers when it is experienced correctly. Budd’s work was published during the beginnings of a resurgence of interest, a few decades ago, in the question of art’s value. From around the same period, see (Walton Citation1993) and (Goldman Citation1995).
19 The idea that Nietzsche thinks that there are different psycho-physical ‘types’ of individual, and in particular the distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ types, is a familiar one (see for instance (Leiter Citation2015)).
20 This passage also introduces another important theme – that of taking a historical perspective on tragedy, and considering the question of its value in light of our own historically situated moment. I shall return to this theme in the final section.
21 There is some reason to think that Plato might actually agree with this (although ultimately of course the details of the two accounts will have to diverge). For what Socrates says that tragedy is able to corrupt even decent people, ‘with a few rare exceptions’ (Republic 605c). In fact I think Plato’s stance towards art must be significantly more complicated than I have portrayed it here, though this is not the place to develop that thought (see (Murdoch Citation1977) for some interesting, though at times rather opaque, discussion).
22 Arguably, Aristotle’s own account of the pleasure of tragedy appeals again to katharsis: tragic pleasure is pleasurable feeling of release of these painful emotions. But see caveats in footnote 8.
23 For opposing views on the question whether Nietzsche is interested in the flourishing of culture in its own right, independent of its effects on the higher types, see (Leiter Citation2015) and (Huddleston Citation2019).
24 I take this to refer to the destruction of the tragic hero within the context of the tragedy.
25 Compare the ‘sharpest spice in the hot draught’ to D 172’s ‘draught appropriate to warriors, something rare, dangerous and bittersweet’, discussed in section 5.
26 Consider, as just one example among many, Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, which raises questions about whether and to what extent the spectator ought to pity Deiáneira and Heracles, both of whom suffer and eventually die, and neither of whom are entirely without blame for their own or each other’s suffering.
27 It is in the spirit of this idea that Bernard Williams, in his Shame and Necessity (Citation2008), picks up the torch from Nietzsche to offer his own account of Greek tragedy, exploring the strange sort of mirror it can hold up to us and our own moral self-understanding.
28 Thanks to participants at the 2022 International Society for Nietzsche Studies conference in Oxford for such a lively and interesting conversation about the paper – especially, but not exclusively, Manuel Dries, Ken Gemes, Andrew Huddleston, Chris Janaway, Paul Katsafanas, Brian Leiter, Simon May, Mark Migotti, Matthieu Queloz, Bernard Reginster, and John Richardson. Chris Raymond was unable to attend, but kindly sent me some very useful comments. Thanks also to Aaron Ridley, who first encouraged me to think about Nietzsche's solution to / dissolution of the paradox of tragic pleasure, to Pascal Brixel and Brookes Brown for their help during the initial stages of the project, and to Alec Hinshelwood and Nikhil Krishnan for many great Nietzsche chats over the years.