We find in Nietzsche's work the culmination of a certain drama of the will that
played itself throughout 19th century German philosophy. It is a curious sequence
that saw Kant put forth the moral will as resulting from reason turned practical,
only to have Schopenhauer assert that the will is the blind kernal of all being.
The will in the latter's system became the thing-in-itself which is revealed through
music as eternal flux and becoming. Now this twisted move from the moral will
to the metaphysical will finds its way to the concept of the Dionysian in The
Birth of Tragedy. "Schopenhauer's interpretation of the 'in-itself' as will
was an essential step," writes Nietzsche in 1887, "but he did not know how to
deify this will." Schopenhauer's pessimism precluded the possibility of affirming
this playful building and destroying of the Heraclitian sense of becoming. Yet
for Nietzsche the early Greek experience of tragedy involved just such an awareness
and affirmation of the Dionysian. The primal will i.e., the undercurrent of life
itself in all its darkness and questionableness, becomes condensed into an Apollinian
image which, in the form of the tragic hero, artistically portrays the ability
to view life with both its joy and its suffering and to affirm life as it is.
"That is your world," Nietzsche quotes Goethe, "A world indeed!"
The absolute
inseparability of pain and joy is the apex of the tragic vision. It is not only
that tragedy mirrors the constructive and destructive dimensions of the primal
will, but rather that tragedy is the affirmation of the necessary unity of
creation and destruction. If one wills life, then one must will the unity of joy
and sorrow, since one necessitates the other. Such an attitude toward the whole
is love of fate. Nietzsche writes (1888): "A Dionysian affirmation of the world
as it is, without subtraction, exception or selection...the highest state a
philosopher can obtain: To stand in a Dionysian relationship to existence - my
formula for this is amor fati."
Schopenhauer's metaphysical will, as the radical principle of becoming, the
"in-itself" behind all ordered representation, is pronounced "sacred" by Nietzsche.
The first appearance of the will in Nietzsche's philosophy takes the form of
the primordial meaning of life itself, a form that is christened Dionysus and
which comes to represent the interdependence of joy and sorrow within the ongoing
flux of becoming. "The Dionysus of the Greeks," he writes, "[was] the religious
affirmation of life, life whole and not denied or in part...the tragic man affirms
even the harshest suffering: He is sufficiently strong, rich and capable of
deifying to do so".
copyright: Robert Cavalier, Department of Philosophy
Carnegie Mellon University