Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of the Tragic (review)

Thanks to the English translation of Metafísica do Trágico. Estudos sobre Nietzsche (Lisbon, 1997), scholars can read and much profit from this acclaimed monograph on Nietzsche's metaphysics of the tragic (the book won the PEN Club Award in 1997). Nuno Nabais teaches philosophy at the University of Lisbon. He is the author of a number of articles on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Ricoeur. His research field also covers Husserl's phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics.

Against the common view, according to which Nietzsche's seminal and most important thought about the tragic is to be found in his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nabais claims in the introduction that Nietzsche's almost uninterrupted silence about the meaning of tragedy until Ecce Homo (1888) ought to be reconsidered: Nietzsche never abandoned the project to conceive a tragic justification of existence, and it "is probably more present in the texts that remain silent on the subject of tragedy than in those in which Sophocles and Euripides are the subjects" (xiii). Before reconstructing Nietzsche's unwritten but constant elaboration on the thought of the tragic, Nabais emphasizes in the first of the six chapters that Nietzsche's view on tragedy in BT ought to be read within the modern conception of the sublime inaugurated by Kant and revisited by Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Wagner.

In the following four chapters, Nabais combines two different approaches—a thematic and a chronological one—to show that Nietzsche's philosophy remains throughout his works committed to the idea of the tragic. Four main concepts (or pairs of concepts) related to the tragic (individual and individuality, necessity and contingency, Stoic ethics and Nietzsche's maxim of amor fati, and the eternal recurrence) are considered at five crucial moments in Nietzsche's intellectual development: before Schopenhauer; following the reading of The World as Will and Representation; after the break with Schopenhauer; at the time of the idea of the eternal recurrence (ER); and finally from 1885 onward, when Nietzsche developed the theory of the will to power (WP) and the diagnosis of nihilism in the Lenzer Heide fragment of 1887. In the sixth and last chapter, the author concludes that the previous four analyzed sets of notions about the tragic converge in the culminating principle of WP and not, as it is often thought, in the idea of ER.

The first chapter suggests that one fruitful way of understanding Nietzsche's aesthetic theory of tragedy is to read it within the Kantian frame of the sublime: "This is because the true model for the fundamental Dionysian/Apollonian theory is the difference between the sublime and the beautiful" (10). According to Nabais, the recent debate between Habermas and Lyotard over The Critique of Judgment has overlooked that Kant's theory of the sublime was indeed the "true model" for Nietzsche's aesthetics in BT. The author shows that Schopenhauer plays a crucial role between Kant's Critique of Judgment and Nietzsche's BT, inasmuch as The World as Will and Representation (1844 ed., chap. 37) claims that tragedy belongs to the feeling of the sublime. Nietzsche takes up the Schopenhauerian pessimism, according to which tragedy represents the essence of the world, that is, the will in its unrepresentability, in which the principium individuationis of the spectator is dissolved. With Wagner's thesis of the sublime nature of music (Beethoven, 1870), Nietzsche adds music to the Schopenhauerian model of the sublime as the exclusive art belonging to the sublime. Yet Nietzsche differs from both Schopenhauer and Wagner in the sense that the experience of the Dionysian formless does not lead to resignation and life negation but, rather, to the Greek aspiration of the Apollonian appearance: "The beautiful that redeems the sublime is Nietzsche's invention" (34). Nietzsche breaks with the primacy that his predecessors had given to morality over aesthetics: the aesthetic experience of the sublime is not a mere step to ethics, but aesthetics is the experience...