Chapter 3 3. Tragic world view

The Apollonian spirit is obsessed with the illusion of appearance and opposes the investigation of the body, but the Dionysian spirit wants to break the illusion of appearance and communicate with the body; the former uses a veil of beauty to cover the tragic face of life, and the latter lifts the veil and looks directly at the tragedy of life; Teach people not to give up the joy of life, the latter teaches people not to avoid the pain of life; the former is persistent in life, the latter is detached from life;Compared with the Apollonian spirit, the Dionysian spirit is more metaphysical and has a strong tragic color.

Once the illusion of appearance is broken, the world and life reveal a terrible truth. How can we affirm life again?This is exactly the problem that the Dionysian spirit wants to solve. Nietzsche begins by analyzing the art of tragedy.Tragedy shows the pain and destruction of individuals to others, but it makes people feel pleasure. Where does this pleasure come from?Schopenhauer said that tragic pleasure is a sense of resignation arising from the realization of the illusory nature of the will to live.Nietzsche put forward the theory of "metaphysical comfort" to explain: tragedy "uses a kind of metaphysical comfort to relieve us: no matter how the appearance changes, the life in the basis of things is still indestructible and full of joy." When watching tragedy, "a kind of The metaphysical comfort allows us to temporarily escape the turmoil of the changing world. In a short moment, we really become the primitive creature itself, feeling its irresistible desire to live and the joy of living.” That is to say, through the destruction of the individual, we feel Seeing the abundance and indestructibility of the will of life in the world, a pleasure arises.From the theory of "resignation to fate" to the theory of "metaphysical comfort", the nature of the will to life as the ontology has changed, from the negative force of blind struggle to the endless creative force.

However, Nietzsche accused Aristotle's "purification" theory and so on as non-aesthetic explanations of tragic pleasure, and demanded to find tragedy-specific pleasure in the purely aesthetic field.How, then, does "metaphysical comfort" become an aesthetic statement?Nietzsche's approach is to artisticize the noumenal world shown to us by tragedy, to view the meaningless world's eternal process of generation and change from an aesthetic point of view, and to endow it with an aesthetic meaning.The world constantly creates and destroys individual life, which is "an aesthetic game that the will entertains itself in its eternal joy", we might as well regard the world as a "dionysian cosmic artist" or a "primitive artist of the world", Standing on his standpoint to look at his own pain and destruction, in this way, the suffering of reality is transformed into aesthetic joy, and the tragedy of life is transformed into the comedy of the world.

Nietzsche believes that the affirmation of life achieved in this way is the highest affirmation, and tragedy is "the highest art of affirming life".Affirming life, together with the pain and destruction it inevitably contains, playing with pain, and obtaining aesthetic pleasure from the tragedy of life, this is Nietzsche's tragic worldview derived from tragic art, and it is also the essence of Dionysian spirit. No matter how aestheticized, "metaphysical consolation" is religious after all. Later, Nietzsche demanded to discard it and all metaphysics as a romantic disease, and advocated "earthly consolation" instead.This shows his dilemma in finding a metaphysical basis for life.