Nietzsche's View of Tragedy

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
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Approximate Word count = 3810
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)

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