This essay will be dealing with the painful harsh truth of our existence according to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and how this could lead to a nihilistic view of life. As intelligent beings with the capability to think, we have all had our moments of existential crises, some may have had them more often than others, but I refuse to believe that anyone has not had them. Whether it is after watching ‘The Matrix’ and you think life is like Putnam’s ‘brain in a vat’ experiment, whether you wake up with this strange feeling as if your dream was more real than the life you wake up to or whether you face those existential crises for the sake of it. Because life can get boring without them and you get amazed by the mysteries of our existence that lie within them. Either way, these existential problems could sometimes lead to scary truths, repulsive thoughts or views of a meaningless life.
The latter is what causes Schopenhauer’s normative pessimism. He believes that reality is built in such a way, that however you look at it, it is just a meaningless effort to continue your existence. Nietzsche follows almost the same philosophy and comes to the same pessimistic conclusion, except unlike Schopenhauer he does not succumb to self pity, he continues his thought and finds in this meaninglessness a purpose, a middle ground, an affirmation of life.
This essay will be explaining Schopenhauer’s notion of existence through cognition and his notion of ‘Will,’ using Martha Nussbaum her interpretation of his philosophy. I will also explain Nietzsche’s thoughts on the same subject, by using his texts ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ and ‘The Dionysiac Worldview.’ I will also go into their pessimistic thoughts and their solutions of dealing with the form of existence they propose. At last I will write about the role that art plays in this, and how Nietzsche finds an affirmation of life in art, specifically in music and tragedy.
The Schopenhauerian Will and Pessimism
When Nietzsche was writing ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ he was very enthusiastic about Schopenhauer. He delved so deeply into Schopenhauer’s philosophy, that most of what he perceived was subject to Schopenhauerian distinctions and categories. So in order to have a good understanding of where Nietzsche gets most of his cryptic or unexplained arguments from, we must look back at Schopenhauer’s more extensive arguments.
Similar to Kant, Schopenhauer argues that our means of perception and thought are not able to grasp the intrinsic structure of reality as it is, apart from the operations of the mind. Everything that we are able to grasp is subject to the categories of the mind and without the mind nothing could be grasped. Schopenhauer, however, took Kant’s line of reasoning in an idealistic direction. He says that the things we experience in perception and thought is not a world of things out there, nor are the things we experience, things in themselves. Rather, Schopenhauer argues, we grasp our own representations of things in perception and thought. We look at things that we ourselves are and have made up. Even relations between these things, such as the distinction between subject and object or the relation of cause and effect, are our own mental representations. They exist from and in our own mental activity. The activity of the representing mind, thus brings the entire world of things into being, as well as the relations that link them to each other. This also includes our own body, the object of our sense-perception, even though we seem to have a distinct, more immediate relationship with it.
According to Schopenhauer our body does have another relation to our being, one which leads to the main point of his philosophy. He thinks that our experience of the world contains something more than just perception, we have the feeling that this story of dreaming cannot be the entire story of our lives. We also have a striving and desiring about us, that makes us do more than contemplate and represent. It surges and pushes us, in which our body handles as the means that gives us the ability to move and act. This different aspect of life is called ‘Will’ and is inseparable from the body. The notion of Will, according to Schopenhauer, subsumes and connects movements from place to place, all forms of desire and the experience of pleasure and pain. He says that it is an active striving that explains all movement, not just in human beings, but in all nature. The experience of the Will is a painful experience and Schopenhauer believes that its goal is some sort of pleasure or satisfaction.
The Will is a drive that propels all beings forward into movement, action and various forms of change and becoming, which eventually all lead up to the characterization of the world of nature as we perceive it. The Will, however is not an individual, nor a plurality of individuals, it contains in itself no principle of individuation. It is only able to attain individuation in experience, when it is connected to the representation of the body whose moving force it is.
So Schopenhauer thinks that a being can relate to its own body in two ways, through Will or in representation, depending on whether cognitive awareness or the need to act is more important. These two relations as two aspects of a single entity are very important, because, as I will explain later on, both Will and representation are important to Nietzsche’s notion of the Apolline and the Dionysian. However, to continue on this binary analysis of Will and representation, Schopenhauer did not only propose it as an analysis of cognition and action. The analysis was accompanied by, and grounds, the normative ‘pessimism,’ that Schopenhauer is famously known for. According to this normative view of life, Willing is, at least for higher creatures, the source of endless suffering. This suffering can only be escaped when we escape the bondage of Will.
According to Nussbaum, Schopenhauer proposes that there are four reasons why we should want to cease this life that is driven by Will. The first reason is that Willing seems inferior as a mode of existence, because its source is always felt in the lack of needs or in suffering. Having desires for the material or other related objects of Will, is not a desire that has any value besides the goal of satisfaction in itself. In other words, we only have the desire to eat in order to fulfill a feeling of hunger, since we would never proceed to engage in such a peculiar activity as to put food in our mouth without a feeling of hunger. This need for extra activities due to needs for fulfilling these sorts of desires seems unfavorable over not having them.
The second argument is that the satisfaction of desire can never be completely fulfilled. Desires are always gratified piece by piece and one after another, so that the subject always remains in a state of longing, even when the subject is satisfying one of his many longings.
The third argument is that satisfaction is always brief, as where desire is always long. In other words, the moment of fulfillment is short while the subject’s demands and requests go on to the infinite.
At last, the satisfaction is so unstable that thinking a subject has ever been completely satisfied is an illusion. There is no stable resting point in desire, because our longing is renewing itself even as we satisfy it.
From all of these arguments, Schopenhauer concludes that true happiness, as a condition of freedom from pain and disturbance, is not possible as long as we are subjected to Will.
One last thing that I would like to address, before I move on to the role of art to suffering, is the way that Schopenhauer relates our attention to our desires. It is concluded that the individual subject is aware of itself as individual through representation and that pure will has no awareness of individuation. However, it seems that, even though it is not sufficient for it, it is necessary for individuation. According to Schopenhauer we are able to become aware of ourselves as distinct individuals, because we are able to make distinctions between our pain and desire and that of others. It is the disturbance that is caused by the greedy Will that makes us focus on ourselves, rather than on the abstract and formal characteristics of the things that surround us. We look at things as specific objects, but they get our attention if they are related to our interests and if they could help us fulfill our desires.
This is where art comes in as something that could heal us according to Schopenhauer. When we experience art, we give it our attention in a way that our perception is brought back from the world of specific objects to the world of contemplation of abstract and general forms. Rather than being focused on the particular and how it could interest our needs, we are focused on the abstract, without the awareness of any way the object may fulfill our needs or desires. Moreover, it is only in this contemplative mode, that we are able to understand the object of art. We are able to see the general qualities of form and shape, without their relation to the Will. It is in this process that we lose the painful awareness of our own individuality that the Will characterizes in our life. Art frees us in some sense, it makes us lose ourselves in another object. It liberates us from pain and suffering and it diminishes selfishness. Unfortunately this experience is unstable, it is rarely pure nor complete for long, and whenever it ceases, we are back at our feelings of desires. Perhaps it even leaves us with a new desire, the desire for more of this feeling.
One would think that art could thus be considered as something good in this life of suffering, however Schopenhauer’s view of tragic art shows us otherwise. Tragedy is a more valuable artform, because in addition to nourishing an aesthetic experience, it also reminds us in its content, of the many reasons we have for turning towards art and away from the will. It is self-reinforcing, because it represents all the sufferings to which we are subject if we live the life of will and desire. Schopenhauer also says that it shows atonement for our offenses, which can be connected to birth itself. This seems as if the reality, which our cognitive functions creates, is mocking us with the life we are living in it.
From all these things we can conclude that the Schopenhauerian suffering is one that is caused by several things. It is because of the Will that we have these bad bodily urges that can never be fulfilled and leave us in a constant state of desire and pain. Besides that both the body and its urges are delusive. Nature as a whole and as a becoming as a whole, is also infected with these delusions. Our experience itself is based on delusions that are created by our own minds, which is quite nihilistic. Through art, especially through tragic art, we are able to comprehend these facts. Our experience of life is thus merely a spectatorship, which in its cognitive structure, gives us examples of detachment from Will. However it never lets us completely detach from it, which seems to be a cruel mocking way of showing us there is something better. This comprehension gives us new motives to reject and blame life for being both evil and false.
Nietzsche and the Apolline
Now that we have covered Schopenhauer’s extensive philosophy, on which Nietzsche’s thought is based, we can begin to understand Nietzsche’s philosophy on the affirmation of life. Despite having a shared pessimistic understanding of existence and of the world with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche is still very critical of Schopenhauer’s account of cognition and desire, and is also very hostile to his normative “pessimism.” Nietzsche might have a lot of ideas similar to his, but he actually uses a lot of his terms and language to subvert his distinctions and arguments. I will argue this later, but one can already see it in the beginning of ‘The Birth of Tragedy,’ where Nietzsche writes about ‘joyous’ experiences and ‘lovely’ semblances of the dream-experience, rather than them being meaningless.
As I said earlier, Will and representation are important to Nietzsche, this is because his notion of Apollo and Dionysus are respectively Will and representation in a Greek costume. The first is linked to cognitive activity, dreaming, visual art and the awareness of general forms, while the latter is linked with movement, sexuality, intoxication, awareness of particularities and the absence of a clear principle of individuation.
Nietzsche speaks of the Apolline and the Dionysiac as artistic powers which come from nature. They are the two drives of nature that create our reality, of which the first creates the perfection of the image-world that binds us and the latter creates an intoxicated reality that tries to release us. In relation to these two states in nature, every artist stands as an imitator. Whether they are an Apolline or Dionysian artist, they would merely recreate what was created and would only imitate the act of creation.
According to Nietzsche, these two drives of nature exist side by side, yet in a continuous conflict with one another. They stimulate and provoke each other to give birth to offspring in whom they perpetuate the conflict inherent to them. They are total opposites and the only thing that creates a connection between them is art. Until finally a work of art emerges in which the Apolline and Dionysiac appear in equal measure, which is tragedy. Nietzsche has a different view on this than Schopenhauer, tragedy provides the possibility to affirm life, rather than merely indicating its meaninglessness. I will come back to this subject later.
Like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche also believes that we experience life as some sort of dream, that is created by our own cognition. Conversely, Nietzsche says we take pleasure in this dreaming, we understand the figures, they speak to us and nothing is indifferent or unnecessary. We do however become aware of the fact that all that we sense is merely semblance. Nietzsche explains human beings as artists as they create their own worlds of dream and the semblance of these dreams as the precondition of all the arts of image-making.
The artist, according to Nietzsche, is able to attend this reality closely and with pleasure. He is able to use the images he perceives to interpret life and practice for it, by means of the events that happen in it. It is not only the good things that help the artist with their intelligibility, but also the bad things. After all, the artist lives in these sufferings too. All these images that the artist creates however, are nothing but the artist themselves, they are merely various objectifications of them. The artist is able to say ‘I’ is the moving center of this world, this ‘I’ is not the same as the waking, empirically real human being, but it is the ‘I’ which truly exists at all, eternal and resting grounds of things. Every image that is created is merely a copy of this ‘I’ and the artist sees and knows this.
To introduce the role of the Will in this, Nietzsche introduces the Greek god Apollo, who in this case, functions as an analogy for the Will. Apollo is the god of all image-making energies, he governs the semblances that are produced by our inner world. He makes sure they are perfect, that they make life possible and worth living. However he also makes sure that the image he makes, the semblance, deceives us as if it were reality. The same way Schopenhauer describes how we are in the bondage of Will, except Nietzsche says that we consist of and are completely trapped in semblance and adds up to that, that we are compelled to feel as if this semblance is our empirical reality, which it is truly not.
So we are trapped in an Apolline dream and if we step away from this for a second, and consider our reality to be a continuously generated representation, then dreams as we know them literally, would be semblances of semblances. They would be a higher satisfaction of the original desire for semblance. Likewise, art is also a semblance of semblance, and is thus also of a higher satisfaction. However, this would mean that all our art making is also just a semblance created from a semblance, although never as perfect as the original semblance would have been created. This process of becoming, in its imperfection, could push the artist out of the joyful life. The Apolline as a single drive for art would thus not be able to affirm life.
Nietzsche and the Dionysiac
According to Schopenhauer, we can be struck by horror the moment we lose faith in the cognitive forms of the phenomenal world. We get confused in finding out what reality is really like, how it is merely a creation of our own cognitive functioning which makes life seem to be meaningless. Nietzsche, however, says that in this moment of horror, a blissful ecstasy arises, from our inner world, from nature itself. In this moment the principle of individuation breaks down and we catch a glimpse of the essence of the Dionysiac. This causes a feeling of intoxication, which causes subjectivity to vanish and brings about a new lust for life. One would feel enchanted, one would no longer be the artist of their own reality, one would have become the work of art. A primordial unity takes place, in which all nature’s artistic power reveals itself.
To turn back to the Will, Nietzsche states that it demands this image-like existence on an Apolline level, because it is employed by nature to achieve its aims. The true goal of it is obscured by a deluded image, we keep reaching out towards the image because of the Will, and nature achieves its goal by means of this deception.
However, according to Nietzsche, the more we become aware of this Apolline dream-image of the world, the more we are driven to and longing for the Dionysiac.
Apollo, or the Will to say, would not want us to release ourselves from this imperative and prescriptive reality. It demands us to respect the limits of the individual, to stay an individual. According to Nietzsche, the Apolline Greek already had to deal with this problem. Considering the Dionysiac to be something barbaric, nonetheless bound to feel more than this reality of merely contemplating representations. Despite the barbaric idea of it, they would gaze upon the Dionysiac, which would expose the truth of their entire existence, resting on a hidden ground of suffering and knowledge. This seems familiar to what Schopenhauer claims to be the moving element of the Will, to show that there is more to life than just perceiving the dream. Nietzsche also seems to say that it is this exact movement that moves us towards the opposite, the Dionysiac. This and what Nietzsche says next, gives me some idea of how the two work as light and darkness. Of which the dominant one obliterates the other, and the other way around. Nietzsche says that Apollo could not live without Dionysus. That the individual who becomes obliterates the self in the Dionysiac condition, forgets about the demands of the Apolline. Just as light could not exist without darkness, just like whenever things are lighted up, one would forget that the only possibility for it to light up would be if there was darkness to be filled.
This would also make Nietzsche’s next argument logical. Namely that music appears as Will. However take into account that appearance and essence are not the same, since music by its essence cannot possibly be Will, for it would have to be banished from the realm of art. The reason I say that what I previously stated would make this argument logical, is because the way light cannot exist without darkness, music cannot exist without silence.
According to Nietzsche, the Greek who has seen the destructive havoc in history and the cruelty of nature, the one who is in danger of more longing, wants to deny his will as well. In other words, he wants to get rid of the Apolline, according to Nietzsche this is where art shows up to save him, and through art life saves him – for itself. The reason for this is that the Dionysiac state will release him from his suffering. The usual barriers and limits of existence are destroyed and all personal experiences from the past are submerged. He moves from the world of everyday life into the Dionysiac experience. Here we see again, that one moves from the Apolline to the Dionysian. The Dionysiac experience, however, will only last for a brief moment and as soon as the daily reality re-enters one’s consciousness will move from bliss to suffering once again. Nietzsche adds up to it that one stays in this will-negating mood. But even though one has had a glimpse of the true essence of things, now that one has knowledge of these things, one’s actions would still never be able to change the eternal essence of things. This leads to the pessimism Nietzsche shares with Schopenhauer, the knowledge about the true essence that kills action. According to Nietzsche, once truth has been seen, the consciousness of it makes it so that one can only see the terrible and absurd in existence wherever he looks. There is no solace for this, their existence has been denied. Hence, the Dionysiac by itself would not suffice as an affirmation of life either.
Similar to what Schopenhauer also says, at this moment, art shows up with the power to heal one from the curse of this absurd nature of existence. Solely art, especially tragedy, is able to redirect the terrible thoughts about this existence into representations with which one can live.
Nietzsche however, does think differently about the way we can look at this pessimism. He thinks that Schopenhauer is wrong and that the entirety of art plays an opposite role in human life. He thinks that instead of art giving the human being a clue of why life should be despised, it shows the human a way of how it might be embraced.
The Affirmation of Life
So now I have established that both the Apollinian and the Dionysiac by themselves will eventually lead to suffering. The Apollinian because it sees art and the aesthetic experience as a lie, in the way that it is a representation of truth, however never more than that. It will always remain an image that is derived from truth and will never actually touch upon truth. One might even say that it denies the truth. Whenever the artist attempts to affirm life through Apollinian art, they are creating mere images or semblances of themselves. This makes it so that the gratification of life can never be fulfilled. On the other hand, the Dionysian by itself would not be able to affirm life either. This is because, whenever one destroys the principle of individuation, one will always get back to a world that they find mundane and not worth living. The normal existence would seem lacking and therefore this would negate life. Nietzsche tries to solve this problem of affirmation by finding a balance between the Apollinian and the Dionysian, which he finds in tragedy.
Up till this point most of Nietzsche’s thoughts on existence and suffering are similar to what Schopenhauer wrote. However Nietzsche does think a little bit differently about the function of tragedy in this. This might be, because he takes the Greek conception of tragedy rather than the, according to him, more pessimistic conception of Christian tragedy, which Schopenhauer values. This is more pessimistic, because the Christian tragedy takes the creative value as an active sin. Hence the justification of the evil human life in which the earlier mentioned human guilt and its sense of suffering come forth.
According to Nietzsche this pessimistic view is un-Apolline, for it is specifically the Will of Apollo that brings rest in individual beings by drawing boundaries between them and by reminding them that these are sacred. However in this Apolline, there is also a need for the Dionysiac, to make sure that life does not turn into the stiffness of rules and complete order. In this dual nature, all that exists is just and unjust and is equally justified in both respects.
This same balance between the Apolline and Dionysian can be found in tragedy. Tragedy shows the spectator an example of order asserted in the face of disorder, because it is an artistic creation that does not depend on any external order in the world of nature, yet still appears asserted in the face of its vulnerability to a life of suffering. According to Nietzsche, the spectator is seduced back into life, even though they are aware that it is their own cognitive activity of making order in a world of nonsense. Because they are shown how the energies that Dionysus represents transform the world of order. They are brought to affirm life, rather than that they are given a reason to get away from life, which is what Schopenhauer argues. Nietzsche stresses that there is a complex interweaving of the Apollinian and Dionysian in both tragedy and in the spectator’s reaction to it. The spectator views a Dionysian image of themselves, visualizing their own body as something orderly, while at the same time partaking in the human capability of artistic creation that is associated with Apollo. Instead of giving up on their will to live, they become the work of art and the artist.
According to Nietzsche we can find this interweaving in Euripidean drama. Rather than creating a body of art, or creating a fictional story that brings a hero upon the stage. He brings the masses themselves upon stage, he portrays everyday life and all its fun and drama. It gives stimulants which are not part of the two artistic drives, they are neither perfect Apolline visions, nor Dionysiac ecstasies. They are stimulating paradoxical thoughts, which are not submerged in art, yet they still show the meaning of life.
To finalize my argumentation I would like to move to Nietzsche’s ‘The Dionysian Worldview,’ in which he states that we now have a middle world between beauty and truth, where it is possible to deny the Apollinian and Dionysian. It reveals itself in working with intoxication rather than being completely trapped in it. It is about going beyond beauty, yet not seeking for truth, but remaining in between the two. Instead of striving after semblances or truth one strives after probability.
As soon as one realizes this, they come to a point of knowledge where they are able to carry on their lives, even when knowing the truth about the nullity of existence, without their world being torn apart by nihilism. Their disgust at the continuation of life can be turned into a means of saintly or artistic creation. Due to this knowledge of existence the terrifying absurdness of existence becomes uplifting as well, because it is only seemingly so.
From this point, semblance is not viewed as semblance anymore, but rather as a symbol or a sign of truth. Nietzsche adds to this that the thing defeating this power of semblance, which reduces it to a symbol, is the power of music.
Just like tragedy, music is also able to overcome the problem of affirmation, according to Nietzsche. It expresses in the same way the Dionysiac capacity of humans and they both originate in the artistic realm which lies beyond the Apolline. They are both able to show that the life in existence is playful, even in the worst of all worlds, while still maintaining the artistic drive that lies in the Apolline.
I think Nietzsche’s conclusion in ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ that leads to an affirmation of life contains a profound insight into the natural origins of art. Of course there is a lot more to his argumentation than I could write in this short essay, but the way he proposes a Dionysiac power that has transformed and transfigured the original Apolline worldview lead to forms of art that both create and affirm themselves, tragedy and music. Both show that the world is full of chance and that it is arbitrary, yet nonetheless beautifully asserts itself in a meaningless existence. Moreover they teach about uncertainties, but also about self reliance, they turn people into both works of art and artists, they are able to affirm life.