On Tragedy - MGTOW

A philosophical analysis of tragedy; how it affects us, how we relate to it, and how we can accept it as part of life.

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Nietzsche ultimately wants to defend a philosophy that can be called a philosophy on the joy of life. However, from his very first works tragedy plays a prominent role in his thinking. The joy of life and tragedy are not opposites. Rather, they are mutually necessary. What I want to do in this video is to talk about the role of tragedy and the nature of tragedy in life as Nietzsche saw it. Nietzsche accomplishes quite a lot in his first book. He lays out an agenda that can be seen throughout his entire philosophical project. The question he asks is: "what was Greek tragedy all about." Nietzsche ponders the fact that the Greeks seem obsessed with the kind of stories where something terrible always seems to befall the characters involved; Most notably the tragedies of Sophocles such the Oedipus trilogy.

Nietzsche end up answering the question by pointing out that the Greeks were not only attempting a type of artistic reconciliation of opposites but actually a kind of solution to the problem of evil. Now, the problem of evil is a traditional religious problem; "is the world good?", "is the world a production of a good God if indeed suffering exists?" What Nietzsche thinks the Greeks achieved in their tragic works was to provide a kind of answer that made sense to them. In raising this question Nietzsche follows his mentor Schopenhauer who thought that basically the world was not good; that life was essentially suffering. This in fact is a Buddhistic theme in Schopenhauer 's thought. Schopenhauer 's conviction was that if you look at the evil around oneself, the most obvious thing to do is to withdraw from life. This is what Nietzsche thinks the Greeks were grappling with too. The Greeks recognized that much about life, at least on the surface, is unacceptable. The Greeks had a particular myth that Nietzsche draws attention to early in the Birth of Tragedy; the story of a demagogue name Silenus. Now, Silenus was captured and told to answer a question. The question was; "What is the best thing for man". At this Silenus laughed and said: "The best thing for man after all is not to be born at all. But the second best is to die soon." Nietzsche thought that this was a counterpart to that sort of philosophy that Schopenhauer had been teaching.

Namely, that you really can't win in this world. That the best thing to do is to be as calm as possible and just get through it. And what Nietzsche sees the Greeks are doing is dealing with this question in Greek tragedy but not drawing the Schopenhauerian conclusion. Rather than concluding that what we all ought to do is withdraw, to tune out from life as much as possible, the Greek tragedy actually shows us a way of celebrating life even with the fact that suffering was an essential part of it. The Dionysian and the Apollonian, two principles put forward by Nietzsche in the Birth of Tragedy turn out to be two artistic principles. Nietzsche considers two different kinds of art forms, both very popular in his own time, the romantic era. One art form, that of the visual arts, and particularly, as he sees it, the art of sculpture, shows the world in a beautified form. It idealizes the appearances of things. It makes things look more beautiful than they are; but it tries to represent the world very clearly, with clear boundaries, with separate individuals, separate entities, that we can appreciate contemplatively.

In this Nietzsche follows both Schopenhauer and Kant in seeing beautiful images in art as a way for human being to focus on something in their world and merely enjoy them - merely enjoy contemplating them, and not relating to them practically.

If you enjoy an artwork that depicts something artistically, it's not a question of seeing something in the picture that you would like to own or being motivated for instance, if it is a still life, to want to get some food that looks as delicious as that in the painting, but instead, idealy, when you view it as art, what you are trying to do is simply contemplate the beauty of form. By contrast, the Dionysian art that Nietzsche talks about is the art of music. In music the natural response is something quite different than in Apollonian art. Rather than simply contemplating, music insights you to be part of something. Nietzsche points out in one of his later works, Twilight of the Idols, that it's actually been quite the achievement for human beings to learn to sit still in concert halls because music urges us to move, to use our whole bodies as a sort of symbolic response to this inciting element of music. ... ...