by Tommy Hanauer
Work in progress; paper was presented at the 2011 18th International Friedrich Nietzsche Society conference.
One question that has emerged in the literature on "The Birth of Tragedy" is the extent to which it is... more
One question that has emerged in the literature on "The Birth of Tragedy" is the extent to which it is continuous with Nietzsche’s later projects. In this paper I address one specific aspect of this debate: the meaning of Nietzsche’s claim, “only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and life eternally justified” (BT 5). Nietzsche’s claims about aesthetic justification seem at first to be continuous with his mature, “life-affirming” reevaluative project. Julian Young and others, however, have argued that Nietzsche’s “aesthetic justification” is nevertheless an iteration of the life-denying pessimism of Schopenhauer. These critics claim that aesthetic justification is not offered for human beings at all, but for the Schopenhauerian “world-Will.” I argue, against this position, that aesthetic justification does not manifest a form of Schopenhauerian pessimism, and that it is designed to affirm the lives of phenomenally-embodied beings like ourselves. In support of this thesis, I introduce a way of reading BT as the continuation of a cultural and philosophical project that originated in Kant’s "Critique of Judgment" and in the Romantic movement that immediately followed it (most notably in Schiller). Nietzsche’s project is continuous with the Kantian project, I argue, in that they are both concerned with a reconciliation of the noumenal and the phenomenal by means of the aesthetic. For Kant, the bridge between noumena and phenomena lies in “beauty,” while for Nietzsche the bridge is “tragedy.” In both cases the attempt is made to reconcile human life with the ultimate ground of being, or to foster a sense of purpose and value that stretches across the metaphysical divide between reality and appearance. Moreover, I claim that reading Nietzsche in this way provides us with a better understanding of the character of his mature reevaluative project.
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