Robrecht Vandemeulebroecke

Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Bélgica
PhD researcher

Mr. Vandemeulebroecke has published articles on Heidegger, Plutarch and Nietzsche. He is affiliated to the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he is preparing a doctoral thesis on the development of Nietzsche’s ideas on Greek Tragedy and their role in his philosophy.

 

Abstract

 

Tragedy and the Paradox of Philosophical Life

Philosophy’s relationship to life can be described in terms of the «paradox of ascetic ideals» that Nietzsche introduces in Zur Genealogie der Moral. As a human activity, it is a part of life and thus depends upon it: when life suffers, philosophy suffers as well. But philosophers are constantly (perhaps unwittingly) attempting «to use their power to plug the sources of the same power», for the knowledge they unveil is often quite hostile to life. Ultimately, that knowledge can be as paralyzing as the tragic experience of the «Dionysian man» who, according to Nietzsche’s description in Die Geburt der Tragödie, has «gazed into the true essence of things» and, as a consequence, has come to find action «repulsive». To prevent this kind of fatal paralysis, the Greeks combined their Dionysian knowledge, which threatened the individual will, with a dose of Apollonian «illusion» or «(self-)deception», producing a unique artistic phenomenon: Greek tragedy. I will show that, in Nietzsche’s view, self-deception plays an equally important role in the paradoxical relationship between philosophy and life. If philosophy is a quest for knowledge, and if «knowledge kills action», then philosophy can only succeed as a human activity if it incorporates some kind of antidote against its own paralysing consequences. This antidote turns out to be very similar to what Nietzsche calls the Apollonian —even if he never uses that term outside the context of Greek tragedy, and barely uses it at all in his later work. In other words: the exploration of «truth», whether in art or in philosophy, must necessarily involve a healthy measure of «illusion» or untruth.
This (self-)deception may consist of such extra-philosophical elements as style, rhetoric and striking metaphors intended to arouse an active response from speaker and listener alike. More generally, it takes the form of a triumphant Promethean pleasure in unearthing knowledge that, even as it «breaks all of reason’s boundaries and plunges man into chaos», is still presumed to set the initiate apart from the ignorant multitude —thus, in the Schopenhauerian vocabulary of Die Geburt der Tragödie, restoring the principium individuationis. Since this sense of triumph—a notion which, in Nietzsche’s work, is strongly connected with Apollo and with the accomplished work of art—makes author and readers feel like they are an exception to the rule, it renders them psychologically immune to whatever «horrible truths» are communicated in the text. Reality may be bleak and hopeless, but we share the author’s illusory triumph at having captured it in all its dreadfulness, at having successfully depicted and thus conquered it. Nietzsche attempts to apply the Apollonian element from Greek tragedy in his philosophy by staging and dramatizing his ideas: however bleak and disheartening his findings may be, he still makes them affirm his own creative triumph by emphasizing his own achievement of being the first to have uncovered them. This «triumphant author» strategy is most explicitly adopted in Ecce Homo, but I will provide several examples of its application as well as its explication throughout Nietzsche’s work.

 

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