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2 The Good and Beautiful Body And another thing will I tell you, and do you lay it to heart: surely you shall not yourself be long in life, but even now does death stand hard by you. —Iliad i. the risk of virtue It would be anachronistic to say that during the tragic age there was a recognized “intimacy” between ethics and aesthetics, since articulating such intimacy hinges on an inclination to distinguish them in the first place. The tendency to separate the “beautiful,” or the central concern of aesthetics, from “the good life,” or the aim of the ethical, is as common among ourselves as that other distinction we make between body and mind. But that such distinctions did not occur during the tragic age held a genuine allure for Nietzsche.1 In our first chapter, we have a sketch of the young man’s approach to the tragic age of Greek culture and how, during this time, “virtue” and “beauty” are embodied in the noble human being. We saw that the values of the earliest warrior aristocracies constitute the link between tragic poetry and cosmology. That is, tragic art and cosmology both express that Dionysian pessimism which, as the attitude characteristic of those who practice the art of dying well, is typical of the savage health Nietzsche identified with everything “fundamentally Hellenic” (T X 3). Having provided a very rudimentary outline of Nietzsche’s perception of the “Greeks of the tragic age,”2 we will now expand upon it in order to access the concerns of chapter 3: namely, his perceptions of how both tragic art and cosmology collapse into decay. As is well-known, Nietzsche identifies the death of tragic art with Socrates, who, having “seduced” Plato into dialectics,3 thereby poisoned philosophy as well. Our task in this chapter, then, is to expand upon the attitude of Dionysian pessimism as characteristic of a healthy warrior aristocracy and to reveal why this attitude constitutes the intimacy Nietzsche saw between what we call ethics and aesthetics. Having The Good and Beautiful Body 35 accomplished this, we will then be in a position to pursue our subsequent concern with why Nietzsche sees the influence of Socratic thought on tragic art and ethics as “anti-Greek” (T II 2). A Good Attitude During “the age of Socrates, among men,” Nietzsche thought, “of fatigued instincts” (B 212), the physical unity of virtue and beauty could not be maintained . Indeed, the technique of dialectics peculiar to Socrates is the ascetic exercise of rejecting the physical in order to gain knowledge of reality and truth.4 However, in the tragic age, Nietzsche saw what we call “ethics” and “aesthetics” as physically united. That is, his youthful encounter with this epoch marks a central feature of the philosophy of the more mature thinker: namely, the human body as the site of virtue and beauty. In the first chapter, we saw the noble type as the physical location of both. The attitude of Dionysian pessimism reveals its ethical contour through the individual’s risk of suffering and death for the sake of something other than himself. And, with regard to the aesthetic, this individual is also an occasion of “beauty” within the art of tragedy to the extent that, as a genuinely noble human being, he is destroyed. “The realm of virtue and of the arts . . . has its inception,” Nietzsche says, “at the point where the individual begins to regard himself as unimportant.”5 The annihilation of my body, or “at least the possibility of such a sacrifice,”6 is the basis of Dionysian pessimism and constitutes both the life of a noble or “good” person as well as the satisfactions of tragic poetry. Yet, whether we speak of these satisfactions or of the “good” man, Nietzsche would say the Dionysian pessimism of Greek antiquity is not only “very hard to understand . . . [and] hardly accessible,” it must also inevitably be “incomprehensible or painful to modern sensibility.” Nevertheless, even if this ancient attitude “has to be foreign” (D 195) to us, we will attempt its further clarification through a dominant and always timely philosophical theme in Nietzsche’s thinking: namely, suffering. We discussed Dionysian pessimism as an attitude Nietzsche identified with the warrior elite of the tragic age. There we saw that “pessimism of strength” (BT SC 1) which, as an acceptance of our inevitable destruction, allows one to decide what is worthy of one’s death. What deserves emphasis here is that in the...

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