Zapffe, Nietzsche, and the Tragic

In ancient Greece, there was a story that appears here and there, including in fragments of Aristotle, but which reaches us, internet users of the 21st century, mainly through Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. It is the Wisdom of Silenus. The Birth of Tragedy is Nietzsche's first book, and although he still has a foot in metaphysics in this book, his thesis was already the same thesis by which his philosophy became marked: the affirmation of life in contrast to the negation of life that we see in Schopenhauer and other pessimistic philosophers, a negation that Nietzsche puts in the same bag as the negation of life in religions, whether ascetic or not, in addition to putting all of it in the same bag as the Socratic rationalism that defined the entire history of philosophy and which, according to Nietzsche, treated the world of becoming as something defective, an absurdity in his view. Nietzsche himself referred to his philosophy as tragic affirmation of life or a tragic worldview, in the sense of Greek tragedy, which serves as an unreserved acceptance of the horrors of existence. It is amor fati, love of fate, whatever fate may be. Nietzsche uses the term "Dionysian pessimism" in The Gay Science to define his philosophy, in contrast to the life-rejecting pessimism.

When Nietzsche brings up the Wisdom of Silenus in The Birth of Tragedy, he does so at the beginning of the work to show how the ancient Greeks had a rather depressing idea of ​​existence. This idea was later supplanted in Greece by the Apollonian worldview, in which life was desirable to the point that the best thing would be never to die, as happens with the heroes who become immortal in Greek myths. The Apollonian is then counterbalanced by the Dionysian, a stance towards life that does not deny death and pain. The tragic, for Nietzsche, is essentially the union between the Apollonian, the orderly, the civilized, with the Dionysian, the chaotic, the ecstatic, and which approaches the notion of the Will in Schopenhauer. The tragic man, for Nietzsche, says yes to everything that the world of becoming provides: be it pleasure, be it pain, be it order, be it chaos. This is interesting because, in the same texts that he so affirms life, Nietzsche complains more about other men than Schopenhauer and Cioran complain about existence in their respective works. At least that's how I see it. And I can say that this is what makes reading Nietzsche interesting to me. If he were merely an affirmer who completely disregarded the horrors, if he had a hippy attitude towards becoming and about men, as some of his followers do, he would be unbearable.

As it is, however, I enjoy reading Nietzsche and I see value in certain positions of his, especially in The Birth of Tragedy, but not only there. And I say this even though I completely disagree with the idea that we should say an unconditional yes to life with all its horrors, say yes to the world of becoming with its complete lack of cosmic meaning. At least there is in Nietzsche a recognition, even if excessively celebratory, of the dark and chaotic side of existence. Really, if I were to embrace existence as an unquestionable good, I might even be Nietzschean. I already consider that I live my daily life in a somewhat Dionysian way, or perhaps Epicurean, if we consider the wine, so it wouldn't be a very big leap. But I don't see existence as an unquestionable good. On the contrary. I consider it in the same way that Cioran considered it in The Trouble with Being Born. There, Cioran writes that life is a flaw, a deviation, a corruption of matter, just as time is a deviation of eternity.

But then, what does the Wisdom of Silenus that circulated among the ancient Greeks say? Quoting the way Nietzsche puts it in The Birth of Tragedy:

An old leg­end has it that King Mi­das hunted a long time in the woods for the wise Silenus, com­pan­ion of Diony­sus, with­out be­ing able to catch him. When he had fi­nally caught him the king asked him what he con­sid­ered man’s great­est good. The dae­mon re­mained sullen and un­com­mu­nica­tive un­til fi­nally, forced by the king, he broke into a shrill laugh and spoke: “Ephemeral wretch, be­got­ten by ac­ci­dent and toil, why do you force me to tell you what it would be your great­est boon not to hear? What would be best for you is quite be­yond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be noth­ing. But the sec­ond best is to die soon.

In Greek mythology, Silenus was the tutor of young Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy, called Bacchus by the Romans — from which comes the term bacchanal, which refers to parties with plenty of wine, champagne, Michelob light, and nudity (pardon the attempt at humor). Silenus served as a father figure to Dionysus, teaching him about drink, music, and ecstatic knowledge. He was considered profoundly wise, which is why King Midas wanted to capture him. Another version of the encounter between Silenus and King Midas is more benevolent. In this version, Silenus got lost in the forest and was found by Midas' servants, who treated him very well. Dionysus, knowing that his tutor had been well treated by Midas, said that the king could have any power he wanted as a reward. Midas chose the power to turn everything he touched into gold. Shortly after, he realized the mess he had made when he could no longer eat or drink, and when he had turned his own daughter into a golden statue, killing her. Then, Dionysus intervened and King Midas returned to normal. Everything ended well, until some other misfortune likely occurred, as is typical in Greek mythology.

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The main work by the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, who died in 1990, best known for his brilliant essay, The Last Messiah, is called On the Tragic. Only very recently has this book been translated from Norwegian into English. It is Zapffe's doctoral thesis, in which he seeks to define the concept of the tragic precisely, without the ambiguities of essayistic and aphoristic writing, types of writing that Nietzsche preferred. Cioran also preferred the aphorism and the free essay, incidentally. Me too. Anyway. You can see the concepts of The Last Messiah here and there in On the Tragic, but the mains issue is not exactly the same, although there are intersections at various points, to the point that it is possible to say that The Last Messiah summarizes some of the main points of Zapffe's grand thesis. However, On the Tragic, while essentially pessimistic and containing hints of antinatalism, is not a book that defends the rejection of the world as directly as the essay The Last Messiah does. In this sense, On the Tragic is a book that may end up disappointing those looking for the very same message that Zapffe conveys in The Last Messiah, since it takes a long time for that message to appear and it doesn't appear all the time.

For Zapffe, the tragic is defined as the catastrophic destruction of a person's principal fighting possibility. In §75 of On the Tragic, he writes:

The objectively tragic, defined with greatest possible conciseness, is thus the destruction of the principal fighting prospect. In ways other than those described above, such destruction, under the present earthly dynamics, can not take place. A more elaborate definition might sound like this: The tragic course comes about in such a way that a person seeks to realize a representative way of life by representative means, and thereby obtains a veto which breaks down one’s faith in life.

By Zapffe's definition, not every catastrophe can be seen as tragic, but every tragedy will be preceded by some type of catastrophe. The tragic course occurs when an individual (or more than one) seeks to achieve a type of life that contains something relevant or great in cultural terms, but has their search vetoed by some factor external or internal to themselves, but which is necessarily linked to this greatness, which destroys their faith in life itself. Another characteristic of the tragic course is that it is always in vain. If it is not in vain, it stops being tragic and, on certain occasions, can be seen as truly heroic. The adjective "great" here does not mean wealth, fame, recognition, at least not directly. Greatness is related to the qualities of the individual himself, which present themselves as some type of fixedness (e.g. unshakable loyalty to a lost cause) or some capacity (e.g. an intellectual power that finds itself confronted by a stupid and violent society). Loyalty to a principle that has come to be frowned upon, or having a curious mindset that seeks the truth in times of censorship, can result in catastrophe, and if that catastrophe destroys the faith in the life of the individual or individuals going through it, or if the catastrophe shakes the faith in the life of an observer, or if both things happen, that catastrophe will be tragic.

Zapffe writes in §93:

We have defined tragedy as the destruction of the principal fighting possibility; in the tragic course, ruin lies in the path of hope. Thus, at the beginning of the course, hope must be present, and at the end of the course, hope must be destroyed — the tragic has its place on the path between hope and non-hope.

That is why, for Zapffe, the human situation as a whole is tragic. We, as a species, possess a greatness related to our cognitive capacity, which is profound and overdeveloped. He makes a comparison in some passages of the book which he also makes in The Last Messiah: just like the Megaloceros giganteus, a species of giant deer that developed enormous antlers — antlers that were initially biologically beneficial to the individuals of the species but later became too heavy and contributed to its extinction — humans have developed an excessively vast mind that weighs us down as time passes, which is why we need pseudo-solutions to cover up the catastrophes that destroy our fighting possibilities, pseudo-solutions such as banal distractions and secular and metaphysical anchors. To make matters worse, we are fixed in our unfixedness. This means that, through our cognitive capacity, our hands can create a world where we can fly like birds, cross oceans like fish, and so on. We are capable of many things that go beyond our apparent physical insignificance, but not capable of inventing a real and satisfying metaphysical purpose for our existence, something we have sought as a species since the beginning; it is no coincidence that the need for metaphysical answers has always been present in all cultures.

Our situation is tragic for Zapffe because, whether for a suffering human or for one observing (or for both), we possess a greatness of spirit that seeks a satisfactory cosmic justification for the world of becoming and for our own lives, but we receive a "veto" from the universe, which comes in the form of its total silence, its monstrous indifference to our desires. In this case, the catastrophe is the silence of the universe, and what makes the situation tragic is that we possess a greatness that is the cause of the catastrophe: the greatness of wanting to be more than mere ephemeral animals devoid of a greater purpose. A catastrophe does not necessarily have to be a physical disaster, although physical disasters also occur multiple times every day with various members of our species. The catastrophe, in the case of human tragedy, is a metaphysical catastrophe: the silence of the cosmos shatters all the metaphysical anchors we have forged. It's no coincidence that religions, at least from a certain point onward, want us to cover our ears, close our eyes, and shout nonsense. Destroying critical thinking is a powerful defense mechanism of the pseudo-solution to the metaphysical question that is the anchor of religious dogma. And there's nowhere to run with Zapffe: religions are pseudo-solutions that help to ward off the despair that would lead us to self-annihilate as a species. Secular ideals, and the distractions of alcohol and debauchery, have the same function, although these do not pretend to provide metaphysical answers.

In §55 Zapffe writes:

Face to face with the total metaphysical problem, anyone who does not give up the requirement of intellectual honesty will presumably feel one’s position dominated by powerlessness and doubt.

According to Zapffe, one of two things must happen: either we abandon intellectual honesty and embrace some metaphysical anchoring, or we are overcome by impotence and doubt in the face of the silence of the cosmos. Of course, after that, we can develop other types of non-metaphysical anchoring. We can also distract ourselves with other things, but it will all be nothing more than a pseudo-solution. Towards the end of the treatise, Zapffe briefly analyzes Nietzsche's concept of the tragic. This occurs in §109. Zapffe makes it clear that Nietzsche's idea of ​​the tragic is not related to the tragic as he, Zapffe, defines the concept. For Zapffe, except for some parts of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche has a very personal and highly mutable idea of ​​the tragic over time. But even if we were to concede and admit that Nietzsche does indeed have a more or less well-defined notion of what is tragic, the fact is that it is not the same as the one defined by Zapffe throughout his doctoral thesis.

In none of the three phases of Nietzsche's work as presented by Zapffe is there a definition of the tragic that is broadly compatible with the one given by Zapffe. Zapffe presents the three phases as follows: (1) The Birth of Tragedy phase, in which Nietzsche still sees Schopenhauer and Wagner as "allies," although he already distances himself from Schopenhauerian pessimism, seeing in Greek tragedy a way to affirm life through the union of the Dionysian and the Apollonian; (2) the phase comprised of Human, All Too Human, The Dawn of the Day, and The Gay Science, in which Nietzsche allies himself with psychology, breaks with Wagner, and favors the strong warrior who loves everything that life has to offer, including pain, through the formula of amor fati; (3) the phase comprised of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and other works, in which Nietzsche would have returned to some metaphysical assumptions that are purely immanent to the human mind, the phase of the eternal return of the same, in which Dionysus returns, but now he is a noble Dionysus who is beyond all values ​​and serves as the ultimate prototype of the Übermensch who affirms the world of becoming. Of course, these phases are not entirely rigid. The concept of eternal return, for example, already appeared in the second phase, mainly in aphorism 341 of The Gay Science.

In short, the tragic in Nietzsche's view ends up being a stance towards life that rejects the existence-rejecting pessimism of Schopenhauer and philosophical pessimism in general, something already found in The Birth of Tragedy. It is something that Nietzsche calls "Dionysian pessimism" in aphorism 370 of The Gay Science, precisely to differentiate it from Schopenhauer's philosophical pessimism. Zapffe, however, has a definition that he believes to be more precise of the tragic phenomenon, which he defines as a catastrophe that destroys the fundamental belief in the lives of the people affected. For Zapffe, as I said before, when some kind of catastrophic event destroys the main fighting possibility, that is, when some external or internal catastrophe destroys that fundamental "something" that makes a person wake up to earn their living day after day, this can be seen as tragic when such a fighting possibility possesses something relevant or grand culturally speaking. In Zapffe's view, culture encompasses all human endeavors directed towards the central goals of individual and collective life. Tragedy, therefore, would always be linked to culturally relevant forms of aspiration.

But would it be possible to live knowing the tragic situation of humanity, according to Zapffe? Yes, of course. He talks about this in §91, but not only there. We live through countless pseudo-solutions or surrogate solutions. Even the notion of heroic life and forms of artistic and aesthetic sublimation are surrogate solutions that divert our gaze, since they cannot change the reality of human tragedy. A truly tragic course can be survived, of course; those affected do not need to perish. But surviving a tragic course biologically does not mean that the tragedy itself never occurred and left its unalterable mark. The tragedy happened, the tragic course occurred; it simply was not able to obliterate life itself. Moreover, in the case of the tragedy of the human condition, the tragic course occurs every day since self-awareness awakened in humankind, that is, since the dawn of our species. This is why humans always need anchors, distractions, etc. Otherwise, he would go mad and eventually become extinct. His consciousness would weigh too heavily on him, just like the antlers of the Megaloceros.

Although Zapffe deals extensively with catastrophes that are not tragedies, what is truly of interest here are catastrophes that are in fact tragic. These have no real solutions, unlike terrible situations that otherwise do not necessarily destroy the hope in life of those directly or indirectly affected by them. Two quick examples are given by Zapffe himself in §55: a hungry person gets food, and a drowning person is able to breathe after being rescued. These are situations that can end in tragedy, of course. They can destroy the faith in life of those directly or indirectly affected. But, in this case, they had real solutions: the hungry man ate, and the drowning man was rescued and is breathing. Qualified tragedies, however, only have pseudo-solutions or surrogate solutions, deceitful "solutions" that never truly heal the wound. These deceitful solutions are incapable of restoring in the human spirit the will to persevere in life. And this is the case with human tragedy as a whole: there are no real solutions.

As Zapffe states at the end of §91, other than pseudo-solutions such as metaphysical or secular anchors, and other than distractions and isolation, the closest thing to a real and effective solution to the human tragedy would be suicide or, better yet, the refusal of reproduction. The collective tragic course of humanity is nothing more than its lack of cosmic meaning. In §59 he writes:

One is the prisoner of life; one is the hostage of an unknown tyrant.

A little further on in the same section, he makes the most explicit mention of antinatalism, and also mentions the inevitability of the species' extinction. He presents both the refusal to reproduce and the fact that the species will one day become extinct as real solutions to the tragedy that is our existence, even if they are sad and somber solutions. It's a rather long passage, but I think it's important to quote it in full:

My tyrant is life, says the metaphysical pain, life and the drive to live. We writhe in the chains of life, and when it has twisted us to the last drop, we are thrown into the grinder of horror to be turned into new lives. To there! we scream every now and then in a sense of clarity that has flared up. Then the tyrant smiles and supplies a new hope that we throw ourselves into with body and soul – and when it is no longer hope but possession, then we are perplexed by its emptiness and scream for a new To there! But in exchange for being a carrier of suffering of the highest order, for being ravaged not only by hunger and cold and holes in the tissue, but also by divine desperation itself, by the anguish of choice, we receive the ability we call our free will. This one door life has left open to its prisoner, that one might have the hope and the inspiration of the idea of liberation to endure: Endure more until one can no longer serve life through breeding and the means for breeding. Then one has no resources and no stimulating principle, and life does not care about which bodily move ments one still performs on the way to the common grave. Life has left a single ability unchained, one that one feels now, the will – tied in relationship to the life drive.

And this is what one is now rebelling against at the threshold of annihilation. You got me, but my son you shall not get! You made a fatal mistake when you allowed the breeding to be under my will. And not by love did you do this, but that I should face this worst of concrete responsibilities when I had fought myself free of the details: Should I carry on this evil or should I not? And now I no longer ask what you want, but you have to ask what I want, and I no longer want to sacrifice to the god of life. I will hit you with the ability you released to torment me; I will use my insight against you and rob you of your prey. And the abused millions will stand behind me like a plow as I sacrifice my most precious

hope on the altar of justice, rebellion, and retribution, and become the last of my generation. And if you still think you are going to win because my wife and I cannot do without a child, to whom we will give our love, then you must still starve and perish, for there will be two breeding, and when they have bred one, they have perfected their abilities. Then they will have one who receives their love and their goods, and carries their dreams further. And always two shall breed one, and I will set this total as a denominator under the number of life and it shall not be like the stars or the sand of the sea, but the river that becomes nothing in the great drought. Then you shall know your impotence and beg me, a human, on your bloody knees. But I will be unrelenting just as you were unrelenting in all my hours of distress. And for a moment I, a human, shall be your equal, your cruel generosity, before you strike me with the black night while I am still alive – the black night in the mind that now there is nothing more for which to hope.

Here we see an echo of that ancient Greek wisdom, the wisdom of Silenus, that taught us that the best thing is not to be born and that, once born, the best thing is extinction, the discontinuation of being. So many turns we have taken since the ancient Greek pessimism that likely existed even before the birth of pre-Socratic philosophy. So many turns we have taken, just to arrive at the same conclusions about life. So many turns. For nothing.

by Fernando Olszewski