THE PROBLEM

In two ways, The Birth of Tragedy stands in Schopenhauer's shadow. First, the metaphysical framework on which it is constructed is Schopenhauer's version of Kantian idealism: Schopenhauer's view that the manifest world is mere ‘appearance’, ultimately a ‘dream’, behind which stands the metaphysically real, the ‘thing in itself’. Second, it assumes the truth of Schopenhauer's pessimism. In our heart of hearts, Nietzsche believes, we all really know that pain is the rule and joy the occasional exception, so that we are permanently liable to experience a paralysing ‘nausea’ (BT 7) in the face of life. In our heart of hearts we are all acquainted, too, with life's ‘absurdity’ (ibid.). We all know that however fine a life we build up, however pretentious a bubble we blow, it will inevitably suffer the fatal prick of death; and so we succumb to the what's-the-point-of-it-all feeling. The contrast between the earnestness with which we pursue our projects and the inexorability of death reveals that, like the serious-faced clown slipping on a banana-skin, there is a tragic yet ‘comic’ (ibid.) aspect to human existence.

The Greeks, says Nietzsche, were especially aware of this, ‘exquisitely’ sensitive to the ‘terrors and horrors’ and absurdity of life. This is the evidence of their myths: the fate of Oedipus, the wisest of men who had solved the riddle of the Sphinx yet was destined to kill his father and sleep with his mother, the fate of Prometheus condemned on account of his love of man to have an eagle feed on his liver, and most directly the ‘wisdom of Silenus’.