Nietzsche's View of Tragedy

The purpose of this research is to examine Nietzsche's view of tragedy vis-a-vis Christianity. The plan of the research will be to set forth Nietzsche's world view and his understanding of both Christianity and the tragic as described in The Birth of Tragedy and Genealogy of Morals and then to discuss tensions and intersections between Christianity and classical tragedy with reference to Christian thought per se, with a view toward evaluating the degree (if any) to which Christianity might produce or give rise to a Christian hero within the classical meaning.

Nietzsche's Weltanschauung stands--more exactly looms--decisively behind any meaningful treatment of Christianity and tragedy because of the manner in which Nietzsche analyzes the moral and psychosocial implications of each philosophical attitude. In both Genealogy of Morals and The Birth of Tragedy, which seem at least as much social commentary as moral philosophy, he repeatedly cites Christianity and tragedy in apposition. Repeatedly and programmatically, Christianity suffers rather by comparison. The Birth of Tragedy, which develops around multiple tensions, is Nietzsche's account of the structure of individual human consciousness as it is and is not and as it ought to be. First there is the metaphorical opposition of Apollo (reason, structure, authority) and Dionysos (passion, joy, heroism), and the tension between the excesses of one or the other becomes very much an analytical category of social and political hist

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tocracies" arise, they are "unwholesome" and "brooding" rather than creative and active (Genealogy of Morals 165-6). This causes values to be turned upside down. Reflective and not active, contemplative and not rational, priestly societies come to hate the more active (more truly noble) human experience. The greatest haters (and priestly class) in human history are the Jews, who, he says, dared to invert the aristocratic value equations good/ noble/powerful/beautiful/ happy/favored-of the-gods and maintain, with the furious hatred of the underprivileged and impotent, that "only the poor, the powerless, are good; only the suffering, sick, and ugly, truly blessed. But you noble and mighty ones of the earth will be, to all eternity, the evil, the cruel, the avaricious, the endless, and thus the cursed and damned!" (Genealogy of Morals 167-8). While this passage may seem anti-Semitic (and while people who have no problem with evil because they so gleefully embrace it have exploited it and similar passages for their own pernicious purposes), a close reading suggests that the attack is not on Jews as a social caste or race or group but rather on a moral value system or world view (inherited by Christianity) characterized by "an unques

Category: Philosophy - N