NIETZSCHE'S RESPONSE TO SCHOPENHAUER

Dr. Nebojsa Nash Jocic

Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy had a significant impact on Nietzsche’s philosophical development. On a few occasions, Nietzsche has openly acknowledged Schopenhauer’s influence, and as he states: ‘And so today I shall remember one of the teachers and taskmasters of whom I can boast, Arthur Schopenhauer’ (UM, III, 1).[2] Also, Nietzsche says: ‘… my first and only teacher, the great Arthur Schopenhauer’ (HH, Preface, 1).[3]

In the following passage, young Nietzsche expresses the powerful influence that his first encounter with Schopenhauer’s philosophy had on him:

I do not know which demon whispered to me: “Take this book home with you.” In any case, it went against the usual custom of avoiding over-hasty book purchases. At home I threw myself into the corner of the sofa with the treasure I had acquired, and started to allow that energetic, sombre genius to work upon me. Here every line screamed renunciation, denial, resignation, here I saw a mirror which caught sight of world, of life, and the own mind in terrifying grandeur. Here the full, disinterested sun-like eye of art looked upon me, here I saw sickness and healing, exile and sanctuary, hell and heaven. (Janaway, 1998, p. 16)[4]

I shall argue here that Nietzsche’s philosophy of art, which is the foundation of his ethics, is deeply rooted in Schopenhauer’s understanding of art.[5] Also, Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power has been significantly influenced by Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will. In his early period, Nietzsche accepted some of Schopenhauer’s fundamental philosophical principles, as seen in The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Nietzsche will accept some of his ideas, but most importantly, some of Nietzsche’s fundamental ideas will be formulated in direct criticism and rejection of Schopenhauer’s. For example, Nietzsche did not accept the will to life as the essence of being, aesthetic experience as disinterestedness, compassion as the basis of morality, or the idea that the world must have moral meaning. Nevertheless, the impact of Schopenhauer’s philosophy on Nietzsche’s thought was equally strong in both the acceptance of some fundamental philosophical views and in the rejection of others. In Nietzsche’s words:

Every art, every philosophy, may be considered a remedy and aid in the service of either growing or declining life: It always presupposes suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the overfullness of life and want a Dionysian art as well as tragic insight and outlook on life – and then those who suffer from impoverishment of life and demand of art and philosophy, calm, stillness, smooth seas, or, on the other hand, frenzy, convulsion, and anaesthesia. Revenge against life itself, the most voluptuous kind of frenzy for those so impoverished! Wagner responds to this dual need of the latter no less than Schopenhauer: They negate life, they slander it, hence they are my antipodes. (NCW, 669)[6]

Nietzsche was impressed with Schopenhauer as he was the first major Western philosopher who openly presented a pessimistic view of the world and moved the centre of philosophical focus from reason to the blind and purposeless will. While Christianity found the meaning of life to be pre-determined with an opportunity for an optimistic end (salvation), Schopenhauer, although accepting the deterministic nature of human life, denied any optimistic outcome. Due to the ubiquity of suffering and the impossibility of happiness, for Schopenhauer, non-existence should be preferred to existence. He also proclaims: ‘We abhor death, and as nature does not lie, and the fear of death is the voice of nature, there must yet be some reason for this (MR, p. 623).[7]

Nietzsche was also strongly influenced by Schopenhauer’s emphasis on the importance of suffering in human lives and has accepted his view that suffering is an inevitable feature of life. He accepted Schopenhauer’s explanation that we as individuals construct our world from experience that would not be possible without our innate categories of time, space and causality. We are able to experience the world as a plurality of individuals, and this essential feature of our experience is what Schopenhauer called the principium individuationis. In BT, Nietzsche embraced Schopenhauer’s principium individuationis and identified Apollonian as the metaphor of individuation, which he identified with principium individuationis. ‘Apollo, however, again appears to us as the apotheosis of principium individuationis’ (BT, 4)[8].

We can find the fundamental difference between the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in their different approaches toward eudaemonistic considerations.[9] For Schopenhauer, suffering/pain and happiness were of central value, and happiness was understood as the absence of suffering. For Nietzsche, suffering is necessary for life enhancement which is much more important than happiness as the absence of suffering. Due to the overwhelming presence of suffering in the world, Schopenhauer did not affirm life and saw its negation as the moral meaning of the world. On the contrary, Nietzsche, via enrichment and enhancement of life, and generally against its moral meaning, championed justification of life only as an aesthetic phenomenon, especially in BT.

Because Nietzsche’s primary interest throughout his philosophical life was life affirmation, I will consider his life affirmation project as the main point of reference. I will relate Nietzsche’s responses to Schopenhauer’s views using life affirmation as the main point of reference. This central point differentiates Nietzsche’s main philosophical views from Schopenhauer’s and, from this perspective, he saw Schopenhauer as his antipode. This essay will mainly focus on Schopenhauer’s influence on Nietzsche’s early development in BT and his response to Schopenhauer.

The Justification of the World

The development of Nietzsche’s pivotal idea in BT that ‘it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified’ (BT, 5) is of central importance to this study. Nietzsche’s statement raises the question of why the world and existence need justification.

While in Christianity, life is justified because it is a God-given opportunity to find salvation, but it is not affirmed since suffering dominates it. Schopenhauer rejects the justification of life due to the overwhelming quantity of suffering in the world. He also rejects the optimistic Christian view that regardless of suffering in this life and lack of affirmation, one can find eternal salvation in Heaven, in the afterlife. As Schopenhauer rejected any salvation in the afterlife, the Christian option was unacceptable, and for him, life was neither justified nor affirmable. Christianity’s and Schopenhauer’s answers to the most fundamental questions regarding suffering and death were moral theories. Faced with the impermanence of human nature and the ubiquity of suffering, both of these answers found the solution to be the repudiation of suffering, hence renouncing life. But were they right?[10] If we accept that the justification of life is achieved only through logical reasoning, it seems as if they were both right. If we accept their rational explanation of the reality of the world in which suffering dominates, it follows that the only solution we are left with is to repudiate life.

Regarding Nietzsche’s view on justification by rational methods, Daniel Came writes:

But he also seems to reject the whole attempt, exemplified by the theological approach, to discharge the need for a justification by rational or conceptual methods. The old Athenians justified their world aesthetically, by finding beauty even in the most terrible depredations; but we moderns, the heirs of Socrates, can accept only reasoned justifications, typified by the empirical generalisation of science and the universal norms of morality. But it seems that we were wrong, and they were right: rationalism in art and in ethics is doomed to fail even on its own terms. The cult of indelibility embodied in morals, in science, in contemporary philosophy, and in realistic art, fails to offer justification. Hence it is central to Nietzsche’s purpose in BT to undercut rationalism. (2009, pp. 45, 46) [11]

Christian and Schopenhauer’s moralities were, for Nietzsche, anti-life moralities, or as he calls Christian morality in ‘The Attempt at Self Criticism’ to BT, written in 1886, a ‘will to negate life’. Nietzsche saw the most significant contribution of BT as the realisation that existence and the world have no moral meaning or significance. Although he addresses Christian morality, the same applies to Schopenhauer’s morality. In the same preface to BT, he writes:

It was against morality that my instinct turned with this questionable book, long ago: it was an instinct that aligned itself with life and that discovered for itself a fundamentally opposite doctrine and valuation of life, purely artistic and anti-Christian. (ASC, 5)[12]

As the central idea of BT, the justification of the world and existence as an aesthetic phenomenon is directly opposed to Schopenhauer’s fundamental belief that the world has a moral meaning: ‘That the world has a mere physical, but no moral significance is the greatest, most ruinous and fundamental error’ (PP II, p. 183).[13] By describing the moral meaning of the world as a renunciation of life, Schopenhauer does not justify it. Nietzsche agreed that the moral evaluation of life was that it is not worth living, which eo ipso denied justification of life. For that reason, he proposed a new, aesthetic justification of life as the only justification possible. Nietzsche accepted Schopenhauer’s view that suffering is a permanent feature of life and did not deny the existential importance of the view that suffering cannot be eliminated. He expresses it in BT in the ‘wisdom of Silenus’, with which Nietzsche reminds us of Schopenhauer’s proposition that, due to the ever-present suffering and impossibility of absolute

happiness, life is not worth living:

Oh, wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is - to die soon. (BT, 3)

Although they both agreed about the importance of the impact of suffering on human lives, Nietzsche’s evaluation of suffering is diametrically opposed to Schopenhauer’s. Schopenhauer saw suffering as an obstacle to happiness that should be avoided because it acts as resistance to achieving our desires. For Nietzsche, suffering was a necessary condition for life affirmation; there would be no redeeming vision and redemption through artistic illusion without suffering. Greeks knew about the horrors of existence, but individuals of sufficient strength did not succumb to suffering. Nietzsche’s focus is on the individuals who are able to profoundly feel the human condition of suffering, ergo to suffer for the whole of humanity, even before they undergo pain and suffering. As Brian Leiter comments:

These “terrible truths” differ, however, in how they inflict their pain. All the “terrible truths” are terrible if con-templated, if internalized, and if taken seriously. But some of the terrible existential truths are, of course, constituted by pain and suffering: they are terrible for those undergoing them. I take it that the Schopenhauerian challenge depends primarily on the former, rather than the latter: that is, Nietzsche’s concern is why we who confront seriously the terrible truths about human situation – even before the ones constituted by pain and suffering befall us – should keep on living, when we know full well that life promises systematic suffering, immorality and illusion. (2018, pp. 154, 155)[14]

Instead of succumbing to suffering, Greeks invented Olympian gods in order to live: ‘The Greek knew and felt the terror and horror of existence. That he might endure this terror at all, he had to interpose between himself and life the radiant dream birth of the Olympians’ (BT, 3). Olympian gods did not cherish charity, mercy, nor asceticism, but triumphant existence ‘in which all things, whether good or evil, are defied’ (ibid). For Nietzsche, to be able to justify life, the noble Helene had to experience the eternal suffering of the primal unity (continuous becoming in space and time, which with its eternal contradiction of life and death finds redemption through illusion) that was only possible through music in the tragedy. [15]

By becoming that primordial being, we become aware of our desire for existence just for a brief moment. At the same time, we realise that the never-ending destruction of the phenomena and individual lives is necessary for the creation of the new forms of life needed for the eternal striving of the universal will. ‘In spite of fear and pity, we are the happy living beings, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose creative joy we are united’ (BT, 17).

For Nietzsche, pessimism dominated the life of people. He saw the way out of it for the ‘modern Europeans’ (ASC, 1) in reviving the tragic culture, which culminated in the Attic tragedy. Life needed to be justified to counter the pessimism that Nietzsche found to be unacceptable. In BT, through Attic tragedy, Nietzsche has found a new way of life justification and speculated that life is worth living only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Therefore, the world and existence are justified.

Tragedy

In general, Nietzsche’s apprehension of the nature and purpose of tragedy and art is antipodal to Schopenhauer’s understanding of the same. For Schopenhauer, tragedy as the pinnacle of art is clear proof that life is not worth living and that extinguishing life is the only salvation we can hope for. Schopenhauer remarks on his view of tragedy in the following paragraph:

Tragedy is to be regarded, and is recognized, as the summit of poetic art, both as regards the greatness of the effect and the difficulty of the achievements. For the whole of our discussion, it is very significant and worth noting that the purpose of this highest poetical achievement is the description of the terrible side of life. The unspeakable pain, the wretchedness and misery of mankind, the triumph of wickedness, the scornful mastery of chance, and the irretrievable fall of the just and the innocent are all here presented to us; and here is to be found a significant hint as to the nature of the world and of existence. It is the antagonism of the will with itself which is here most completely unfolded at the highest grade of its objectivity, and which comes into fearful prominence. (WWR I, p. 253)[16]

We see from the above quotation Schopenhauer’s conclusive view of the role of tragedy to present us with the ‘terrible side of life’ and ‘misery of mankind’. His metaphysical proposition that the moral meaning of the world is in the realisation that life is not worth living finds its definitive approval in tragedy. The spectator’s participation, or benefit from tragedy, is achieved through the ‘resigned exaltation of the mind’ and the realisation that the human condition of suffering is ineluctable. As Schopenhauer remarks:

Thus the summons to turn away from the will from life remains the true tendency of tragedy, the ultimate purpose of the intentional presentation of the sufferings of mankind.; consequently it exists even where this resigned exaltation of the mind is not shown in the hero himself, but is only stimulated in the spectator at the sight of great unmerited, or indeed even merited, suffering. (WWR II, p. 435)[17]

Contrary to Schopenhauer’s inauguration of tragedy as the proof that pessimism and repudiation of life are our only road to salvation, Nietzsche sees tragedy as the apex of art, which helps us to justify life. For Nietzsche, life is worth living, and tragedy guides us towards its affirmation. Comparing Nietzsche’s understanding of art with that of Schopenhauer’s, Martha C. Nussbaum correctly states:

From The Birth of Tragedy on through his latest works, Nietzsche consistently opposed this picture of the arts, denying that we can understand the role that works of art play in human lives, or even adequately explain particular judgements of beauty and ugliness, without connecting these to human practical needs – and needs that are directed toward living and affirming life, rather than toward resignation and denial. (2009, p. 361)[18]

Nietzsche opposes Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view of tragedy and art in general and proclaims:

What is essential in art remains its perfection of existence, its production of perfection and plenitude; art is essentially affirmation, blessing, deification of existence – What does a pessimistic art signify? Is it not a contradictio? – Yes. – Schopenhauer is wrong when he says that certain works of art serve pessimism. Tragedy does not teach “resignation” – To represent terrible and questionable things is in itself an instinct for power and magnificence in an artist: he does not fear them – There is no such a thing as pessimistic art – Art affirms. (WP, 821)[19]

Apollo and Dionysus

What makes tragedy the apex of art for Nietzsche is the unique interplay between the Apollonian and Dionysian arts, specific only to tragedy. According to Nietzsche, Schopenhauer neither recognized the role of Apollonian element in tragedy, nor the opportunity to comprehend ‘eternal joy of becoming’ in the Dionysian element. In this important quote, Nietzsche’s remarks on tragedy clearly show his disagreement with Schopenhauer:

Tragedy is so far from providing evidence for pessimism among the Hellenes in Schopenhauer’s sense that it has to be considered the decisive repudiation of that idea and the counter-verdict to it. Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types – that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not to get rid of pity and terror, not so as to purify oneself of a dangerous emotion through its vehement discharge – it was thus Aristotle understood it -: but, beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming – that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction… (TI, X, 5)[20]

Not only does the above quote show the different understandings of the meaning of tragedy between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but it also shows that affirmation of life, via the aesthetic comprehension of the world and existence, which ultimately requires illusions (both Apollonian and Dionysian), cannot be a failed attempt by Nietzsche to justify life (as Young advocated). But, for the full comprehension of tragedy and realisation that tragedy can offer us the means for justifying life, unique types of individuals, or as Nietzsche calls them ‘truly aesthetic spectators’, are needed:

Those who have never had the experience of having to see at the same time that they also longed to transcendent all seeing will scarcely be able to imagine how definitely and clearly these two processes coexist and are left at the same time, as one contemplates the tragic myth. But all truly aesthetic spectators will confirm that among the peculiar effects of tragedy this coexistence is the most remarkable. Now transfer this phenomenon of the aesthetic spectator into an analogous process in the tragic artist, and you will have understood the genesis of the tragic myth. With the Apollonian art sphere he shares the complete pleasure in mere appearances and in seeing, yet at the same time he negates this pleasure and finds a still higher satisfaction in the distraction of the visible world of mere appearance. (BT, 24)

Nietzsche inaugurates the unique type, or, as he calls ‘more nobly formed natures’ (BT, 18), who plays a pivotal role in Nietzsche’s justification of life in. This unique type of individual is also a ‘truly aesthetic spectator’ capable of absorbing the message that tragedy sends, that life is worth living.

In the following paragraph, Alexander Nehamas states:

But juxtaposed with the most powerful representation of the vanity of all efforts is the tragic chorus, assuring its spectators that even in their efforts to change nature, the tragic heroes, like those spectators themselves, are its products and elements, and the realisation that one is a part of everything that lives makes life “indestructibly powerful and pleasurable” and therefore worth living after all. (2002, p. 119)[21]

For Nietzsche, the essence of art is in life affirmation. Art should be seen through the perspective of life, and as such, art should serve life. This is the only purpose of art. As he puts it in the following quote: ‘Art is a great stimulus to life: how could it be thought purposeless, aimless, l’art pour l’art?’ (TI, IX, 24). As Nietzsche will later say, he already started with his revaluation of all values in BT (TI, X, 5). He stood up against Schopenhauer’s pessimism and used Attic tragedy as an example of life justification and a way of saying yes to life. He does so through his different evaluation of suffering, which he does not see as an obstacle but rather as a challenge for self-overcoming. In the following section, Nietzsche explains the unique interplay of Apollonian and Dionysian elements:

Thus the Apollinian tears us out of the Dionysian universality and lets us find delight in individuals; it attaches our pity to them, and by means of them it satisfies our sense of beauty which longs for great and sublime forms; it presents images of life to us, and incites us to comprehend in thought the core of life they contain. With the immense impact of the image, the concept, the ethical teaching, and the sympathetic emotion, Apollinian tears man from his orgiastic self-annihilation and blinds him to the universality of the Dionysian process, deluding him into the belief that he is seeing a single image of the world. (BT, 21)

I agree with Bernard Reginster’s remarks that for those who may succumb to Schopenhauer’s pessimism: ‘Nietzsche has… used only the illusion of art to prescribe an antidote’ (2008, pp. 248, 249)[22]. Thus, he uses a unique amalgamation of Apollonian (plastic art) and Dionysian arts (music) to justify the world as a purely aesthetic phenomenon. But, if Nietzsche accepted Schopenhauer’s dichotomy of the individual existence and the will, as two antipodal forces, how was their amalgamation possible? Schopenhauer’s understanding was that the will ultimately negates individuality. Once understood via our logical reasoning, the will forces the individual to the only solution, which is the negation of life. For Schopenhauer, individuation is the source of all suffering and, for that reason, something that should be deplored. Contrary to Schopenhauer, although antipodal, Nietzsche saw the Apollonian (metaphor of individuality) and Dionysian (metaphor of the will) as complementary forces that need each other. According to Nietzsche, even the ‘primordial being’ (BT, 17), the essence of things, needed redemption, and the only way to reach redemption is through illusion, achieved via Apollonian art. As Nietzsche explains:

Though it is certain that of the two halves of our existence, the waking and dreaming state, the former appeals to us as infinitely preferable, more important, excellent, and worthy of being lived, indeed, as that which alone is lived – yet in relation to that mysterious ground of our being of we are the phenomena, I should, paradoxical as it may seem, maintain the very opposite estimate of the value of the dreams. For the more clearly I perceive in nature those omnipotent impulses, and in them an ardent longing for illusion, for redemption through illusion, the more I feel myself impelled to the metaphysical assumption that the truly existent primal unity, eternally suffering and contradictory, also needs the rapturous vision, the pleasurable illusion, for its continuous redemption. (BT, 4)

Schopenhauer’s metaphysics profoundly influenced Nietzsche’s concepts of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Although Nietzsche did not advocate Schopenhauer’s metaphysics in BT, he has followed Schopenhauer’s dichotomy of the individual and the will and transformed them into the phenomenon of Apollonian and Dionysian. As a result, he viewed Schopenhauer’s metaphysics as unavoidable. As Christopher Janaway rightly notes:

He does not propound the doctrine that the thing in itself, lying beneath individuation, is will. Rather, his construction of the symbols of Apollo and Dionysus exploits Schopenhauer’s opposition between individuation and the world-whole, while the Schopenhauerian system hovers eerily in the background, unasserted but indispensable. (1998, p. 22)

Rational versus Aesthetic

Nietzsche affirmed that, linguistically, we could achieve every description of a thing in itself. While the thing in itself can be described conceptually, that does not mean that it can be explained. As Nietzsche puts it: ‘We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interest of the human herd, the species’ (GS, 354)[23]. Schopenhauer arrives at the understanding of the thing in itself, as the will, rationally through philosophy. Following his rational explanation of the will as blind and purposeless striving, he concludes that life is not worth living. Contrary to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche rejects the possibility of a rational explanation of the thing in itself as the will and endorses aesthetic experience as the only way of experiencing the Dionysian truth. But for Nietzsche, it was clear that tragedy starts with non-linguistic and non-conceptual experience. The artist abandons his individuality and becomes part of the whole or the primal unity. Since the world and existence could not be justified morally, Nietzsche sees them as justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.

In this supportive claim, Maudemarie Clark says:

I therefore see The Birth of Tragedy as an attempt to save Schopenhauer’s metaphysics by reinterpreting the will as the poetic expression of a non-conceptual experience of the thing in itself. (1998, p. 45) [24]

For the same reason, Nietzsche later concludes: ‘I’m convinced that art represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life’ (BT, Preface to Richard Wagner). Art as ipso facto non-conceptual experience is the highest task for Nietzsche as it is only via art that we can experience life as worth living and justify it, contrary to Schopenhauer’s view that in art, we find only a temporary solace from suffering.

Schopenhauer’s will, as blind and purposeless striving, is reflected in Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian as the never-ending flux and eternal life to which individual destinies and lives are irrelevant. Schopenhauer’s dichotomy of the will and individuals reaches further into Nietzsche’s concept of the Apollonian, in which Schopenhauer’s Principium Individuationis is reflected:

We might call Apollo himself the glorious divine image of the principium individuationis, through whose gestures and eyes all the joy and wisdom off “illusion,” together with its beauty, speak to us. (BT, 1)

The Apollonian emerges as the individual’s illusion and his construction of the world. But, contrary to Schopenhauer, for whom our rational ability is de facto directed by the will as our essence, for Nietzsche, our main drives are not motivated by the transcendental will but rather by our aesthetic needs. I agree with Ivan Soll’s observation that:

He attributes the structuring rather to what might be considered an aesthetic need for experiences of beauty, which in turn serves a deeper existential need to make our lives seem tolerable and even attractive. (2016, p. 171)[25]

Soll’s view highlights the more profound existential nature of the Apollonian. Apollo has to deliver beautiful illusion and satisfy our need for beauty. Still, at the same time, it diverges from the rational pessimistic moral ‘ought’ that Schopenhauer offered as the only option for salvation, and brought the prospect of tolerable life. Although one may argue that the Apollonian can be the same as Schopenhauer’s individuated rational experience, Nietzsche has created the Apollonian with a more general purpose. It is not only bound to the rational experience of the world but also the human need to make life beautiful and therefore justified despite the inevitable suffering. This fact points out the difference between Schopenhauer’s individual and Nietzsche’s Apollonian, which Nietzsche has already developed in BT, and suggests that it is life justification as an aesthetic and existential concern that interested him, and not life denial. Since purely rational understanding and construction of the world leads to pessimism, as Schopenhauer has shown, Nietzsche’s vision of life affirmation required the world to be justified ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon’ (BT, 5).

Nietzsche’s understanding of the Dionysian directly relates to Schopenhauer’s concept of the will. The Dionysian stands in opposition to the Apollonian. Via the primary drive of the Dionysian, individuals liberate themselves from the illusion of separateness that posits them as not only separated from each other, but also separated from nature. They become aware that they are, in essence, all the same, all one. Nietzsche has offered a deeper understanding of life through the Dionysian, but his motive again is not the same as Schopenhauer’s, which is constricted to rational interest only. Nietzsche’s interest is deeply existential, and his end in BT is life justification, as opposed to Schopenhauer’s discovery of truth through knowledge that led to pessimism. For Schopenhauer, merging with the will (the Unity) means denial of the individual: ‘the Unity, implies distancing from everyday, individual, worldly desires, which are shown to be relatively insignificant’ (Stern, 2019, p. 359)[26]. For Nietzsche, merging with the Dionysian/unity has a different outcome. Unlike Schopenhauer’s will/unity, which is generally bad, the Dionysian truth does not amount to something bad for Nietzsche. As Tom Stern puts it:

This matters, as we know, because in BT we can merge with this not-bad Unity: life is not bad as a whole. If the condemnation of life extends to the Unity, then life as a whole is indeed bad. But Nietzsche doesn’t seem to think that: the Unity experiences, as the bare minimum, a constant, intense, quasi-sexual pleasure (BT 4), albeit a pleasure which is the response to or relief from pain. Even a world in which the sufferings are not for nothing, in which they occur for the enjoyment of some permanently pleasures spectator (let alone one who is, in some deeper sense, also me), might be thought better than a purely mechanistic world in which I count for nothing, or one in which the divine takes no interest in me. In important respect, then, BT’s diagnosis differs from Schopenhauer’s and is not pessimistic (2019, pp. 359, 360).

Although Nietzsche agrees with Schopenhauer that the world we experience is illusory, and constructed from our own experience to serve the will, his attitude towards the illusory character of our experience differed significantly from Schopenhauer’s. Contrary to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche did not negate illusion as an inferior form of experience to a rational understanding of what is considered to be the truth. On the contrary, in his application of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, he emphasised the importance of fiction, lies, illusory experience, and sexual drives. Nietzsche argued that some illusory experiences are necessary for our survival in his pursuit of life justification. They enable us to overcome the difficulties we are exposed to in everyday struggles and sufferings.

Nietzsche’s attitude towards life was opposite to that of Schopenhauer’s. While for Schopenhauer, the meaning of the world is to negate life, and art serves as the proof that life/will can be extinguished, although only momentarily, for Nietzsche, life should be justified and affirmed as worth living. Nietzsche has criticised Schopenhauer’s will to life as the essence of the world and instead introduced the will to power as the crux of everything living. This fundamental difference between the two great philosophers determined their understandings of the meaning of art. While for Schopenhauer, the meaning of art is its palliative effect that is achieved through the disinterested contemplation of ideas and abolishing suffering, for Nietzsche, art helps us to justify and affirm life through the creative and interested process of overcoming necessary suffering and becoming who we are.

Since only art can deliver a means of life justification, hence survival in the psychological realm, Nietzsche introduced Apollonian and Dionysian arts and, in their deception, found a way to justify life. For Schopenhauer, our ability to rise above all willing and enter the state of contemplation of ideas is impossible while we still desire and remain individuals. As he states:

When we enter the state of pure contemplation, we are raised for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares; we are, so to speak, rid of ourselves. We are no longer the individual that knows in the interest of its constant willing, the correlative of the particular thing to which objects become motives, but eternal subject of knowing purified of the will, the correlative of Idea. (WWR I, p. 390)

Purposefulness of Art

Contrary to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche sees art as important because it is purposeful. The purpose of art is to make life bearable. For this reason, Nietzsche rejected the idea that art can be the end in itself and opposed Schopenhauer’s view of disinterestedness as the condition for aesthetic experience. Nietzsche, in his later writings, says: ‘Art is a great stimulus to life: how could it be thought as purposeless, as aimless, l’art pour l’art?’ (TI, IX, 24).

But why did Nietzsche not simply accept the will as advocated by Schopenhauer? What was Nietzsche’s reason for creating a Dionysian presence in the tragedy? And also, is it not so that Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian is a precise copy of Schopenhauer’s will? I disagree with Martha C. Nussbaum’s view that: ‘Nietzsche ‘s Apollo and Dionysus are, up to a point, simply Representation and Will in Greek costume’ (1999, p. 358). Although it may seem that she is right, at first sight, there is an essential difference between the two. According to Schopenhauer, we arrive at an understanding of the will rationally through philosophy and asceticism. Understanding the nature of the will is enough to convince us that our individual lives are not worth living and that the only moral choice we are left with is the negation of life. For Nietzsche, the discovery of the Dionysian through tragedy (the apex of art), is not anti-life as it does not destroy the individual. He introduced the Dionysian, ‘which is brought home to us most intimately by the analogy of intoxication’ (BT, 1) as the drunkenness and orgiastic frenzy phenomenon that is manifested in the tragedy through the dancing and singing of the chorus, so that ‘as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self – forgetfulness’ (ibid). This self–forgetfulness allows the individual to become united with others and also with nature itself. Dionysian experience can be seen as the necessary path to defragmentation of individuality that leads to the discovery of the ‘primal unity’ and, in that way, liberates one from the burden of individual life. The Dionysian, in a way, opened the door to the discovery of the ‘horrible truth’, but that door stayed open.

Contrary to Schopenhauer, for Nietzsche, the discovery of the ‘primordial unity’ did not consume the individual. Schopenhauer argued that once the individual discovers the will (Dionysian for Nietzsche), he has no other moral choice but to repudiate life. ‘Self-forgetfulness’ for Nietzsche does not mean self-destruction. Rather, as the individual comes as close as possible to the ‘primal oneness’, but at the same time avoids being psychologically ‘shattered into pieces’ (BT, 21), it survives, being saved by the power of the Apollonian art.

Simultaneously, the individual becomes richer by the new experience of discovering the eternal flux of life, which, undisrupted by the individual destinies, continues to flow eternally. While emphasising the difference between Nietzsche’s Dionysian and Schopenhauer’s will, it is important to reflect on Schopenhauer’s understanding that sexual instinct, a major human desire, is de facto major cause of human suffering. For Schopenhauer, the sexual drive had to be extinguished and repudiated; it played a very different role for Nietzsche. Although the following passage is Nietzsche’s mature account of the Dionysian, it can help us to better understand his early intentions and the nature of the Dionysian even in the BT:

Do you desire the most astonishing proof of how far the transfiguring power of intoxication can go? –‘Love’ is this proof: that which is called love in all the languages and silences in the world…And in any case, one lies well when one loves, about oneself and to oneself: one seems to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more perfect, one is more perfect – Here we discover art as an organic function. (WP, 808)

The more profound ethos of the Dionysian that Nietzsche had in mind in BT is transparent from the above quote. As Nussbaum will justly explain, Eros is the primary drive that makes one ‘stronger, richer, more perfect’. According to Nietzsche, it is responsible for helping one’s life become the product of art, rather than being alienated as the major obstacle to freedom. Regarding Nietzsche’s counterview to Schopenhauer’s understanding of sexual desire, Nussbaum comments:

Instead of being an unintelligent force of bondage and constraint, dooming its subject to a life of delusion, Nietzsche’s Eros is a clever and subtle artist…it transforms its subject into a being who seems stronger, richer, deeper. But these semblances are also realities: for the artistry of human desire makes the human being into a work of art. (1999, p. 371)

Tangled up in the apparent necessity of individual separateness and exaggerated self-centeredness in their everyday lives, individuals remain constrained and never cherish their lives. Nietzsche’s introduction of the Dionysian in BT plays the crucial role of introducing the individual to the ‘primordial unity’ (BT, 1) and offering conciliation in the discovery that there is something much deeper and timeless underneath the individual life, which Nietzsche has called ‘higher community’ (ibid). This Dionysian discovery removes the constraining seriousness of individual life and the superficial fear of ephemerality, allowing the now rejuvenated and free individual to bounce back to life and go on living.

Through art in BT, Nietzsche’s speculated redemption of life has already inaugurated his later teaching of the will to power, although intuitively rather than purposefully. His plea for life affirmation, which stands as antipodal to Schopenhauer’s pessimism, is founded in his acceptance, not rejection, of the ‘terror and horror of existence’ and the ‘eternal suffering’. Influenced by Schopenhauer’s views, which he opposed, Nietzsche, as early as in BT, proposed the new value as power, which manifested itself in the fusion of two antipodal forces, contrary to Schopenhauer’s life resignation and avoidance of pain. As Soll rightly asserts:

In proposing that the ultimate motive of human action and the ultimate source of all satisfaction and value is power rather than pleasure and avoidance of pain, Nietzsche gave himself the logical space he needed to be able, in coherent manner, to affirm life, despite the preponderance of suffering in it. (1998, p. 101)

Being the main idea of BT, life justification perpetuates throughout the book in Nietzsche’s call to amalgamate the Apollonian and Dionysian as the creative act of power that justifies life. In understanding that art is of the highest importance in life, Nietzsche parted ways with Schopenhauer and understood art as the highest metaphysical activity of man. In his later works, Nietzsche introduced the diametrically opposing theory of the will to power in contrast to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will. This concept of creative artistic power that has started in BT will permeate throughout Nietzsche’s later work and is best shown in the difference between Schopenhauer’s passive understanding of the importance of art and Nietzsche’s creative force as the active expression through art.

Concluding Remarks

Schopenhauer’s most important influence on Nietzsche was his introduction of suffering as the central issue of human life. His focus on the will as the centre of philosophical investigation rather than reason, and suffering as the essence of willing, has offered Nietzsche direction for creating his philosophy of life affirmation. As I have shown, in BT, Nietzsche has accepted Schopenhauer’s dichotomy of the individual and the will and personified them in Apollonian and Dionysian elements. Their fusion achieved via Attic tragedy offered a unique opportunity to experience life as worth living.

Schopenhauer evaluated that suffering led unequivocally to pessimism and life resignation. For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s moral meaning of the world explained as life denial could not justify life. For him, justification of life was only possible through artistic experience and, therefore, only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Antipodal evaluation of suffering gave Nietzsche ground for a new understanding of art. Through artistic creativity, he discovered that the essence of the world is the will to power and not the will to life.

While Schopenhauer used tragedy as a powerful proof that life is not worth living and that we are left with the only option, which is a pessimistic attitude to life, Nietzsche saw tragedy as the completely opposite proof that life is worth living. Schopenhauer failed to realise that the pathos of tragedy consists of the unique fusion of Apollonian and Dionysian elements, and not solely of the Dionysian, which he identified with the will. Regarding the distinctive interplay of the Dionysian and Apollonian, Silk and Stern remark:

Tragedy’s specific effect depends on the interaction of its two components, the Apolline drama and Dionysiac music. There is a fashionable but crude notion that music and drama are related like the body and soul. In fact the relationship between the two is intricate. The chief function of the Apolline elements is to shield the spectator against the full impact of the music; and it is actually the presence of this shield that permits the highest potential of music to be realized. By itself such music would be shattering with its evocation of primordial universality, but the Apolline particularity of the tragic myth makes the evocation bearable by giving us sublime individuals to feel for and to satisfy our sense of beauty. (1995, p. 84)

In his view that ‘art is the highest task and true metaphysical activity of this life’, Nietzsche implied that illusion is an essential part of our aesthetic experience (Apollonian art and Dionysian art are inseparable from illusion). As such, illusion is necessary for the justification of life. Schopenhauer did not recognise the importance of illusion in artistic contemplation and granted art only with a momentary palliative effect. Contrary to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche embraced illusion and saw it as a part of aesthetic experience in both the beautiful (Apollonian) and the sublime (Dionysian), and as an unavoidable and uniquely human ability to justify life. His introduction of the sublime, as the aesthetic experience of Dionysian art/music, was necessary to bring in us a pleasurable feeling, ‘metaphysical comfort’, or an elevated state in the realisation of the Dionysian truth that: ‘life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable’ (BT, 7).

As early as in BT, Nietzsche has set his sights on the importance of individual aesthetic experience. Contrary to Schopenhauer, he did not repudiate individual life but has, through Attic tragedy’s unique experience, inaugurated individual life as the facilitator of life justification. He embraced illusion as a necessary component in Apollonian contemplation of the beautiful and Dionysian reflection of the sublime. Nietzsche realised that neither Apollonian illusion nor Dionysian truth on its own would be capable of offering life justification. In the former case, the illusion of the beautiful was only momentary and acted as a veil for hiding the harsh reality of life. In the latter case, Dionysian illusion on its own would psychologically shatter the individual. Since Nietzsche wanted to preserve the unique type of individual as the bearer of life justification, he found in the fusion of Apollonian and Dionysian the unique way of justifying life, hence his admiration of Attic tragedy as the highest art form.

Schopenhauer’s influence on Nietzsche was multifaceted: Nietzsche accepted from Schopenhauer his dichotomy of the individual and the will, that suffering is a permanent feature of life, that the focus of philosophical enquires is moved from reason to will, and that art is the critical area of human expression. However, Nietzsche also rejected many of Schopenhauer’s views, some of which he found antipodal. And although, in the later stage, Nietzsche tried to distance himself from the influence of Schopenhauer entirely and congratulated himself for being an original thinker, he has never managed to free himself from Schopenhauer’s influence completely.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Came, D. 2009. ‘The Aesthetic Justification of Existence’, in Keith Ansell Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche, (Blackwell Publishing Ltd): 41-45.

Clark, M. 1998. ‘On Knowledge, Truth and value: Nietzsche’s Debt to Schopenhauer and the Development of his Empiricism’ in Janaway, C (ed.), Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator, (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 37-78.

Foster, C. 2009. ‘Ideas an Imagination – Schopenhauer on the Proper Foundation of Art’ in Janaway, C (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Janaway, C. 1998. ‘Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator’ in Janaway, C. (ed.), Willing and Nothingness (Oxford: Clarendon Press): 13-37.

Jacquette, D. 2009. ‘Schopenhauer on Death’ in Janaway, C (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 293-318.

Leiter, B. 2018. ‘The truth is Terrible’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, vol 49. N. 2, pp. 151-173.

Nehamas, A. 2002. Nietzsche: Life as Literature (London: Harvard University Press).

Nietzsche, F. 1997. Untimely Meditations, Hollingdale, R.J. (trans.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Nietzsche, F. 2008. Human all too Human, Zimmern, H. and Cohn, P. (trans.) (St. Ives: Wordsworth Editions).

Nietzsche, F. 1968. The Will to Power, Kaufmann, W. and Hollingdale, R.J. (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books).

Nietzsche, F. 1967. ‘Attempt at Self Criticism’ in The Birth of Tragedy, Kaufmann, W. (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books).

Nietzsche, F. 1967. The Birth of Tragedy, Kaufmann, W. (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books).

Nietzsche, F. 1974. The Gay Science, Kaufmann, W. (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books).

Nietzsche, F. 1976. Nietzsche Contra Wagner, Kaufmann, W. (trans.), (London: Penguin Books).

Nietzsche, F. 1982. ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, in The Portable Nietzsche, Kaufmann, W. (trans.) (London: Penguin Books).

Nussbaum, M.C. 2009. ‘Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Dionysus’ in Janaway C. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Reginster, B. 2008, The Affirmation of Life (London: Harvard University press).

Schopenhauer, A. 2017. Parerga and Paralipomena II, Del Caro, A. and Janaway, C. (trans.), (Cambridge: University Press).

Schopenhauer, A. 1988. Manuscript Remains, Payne, E.F.J. (trans.), (Oxford: Berg).

Schopenhauer, A. 1966, The world as Will and Representation I, Payne, E.F.J. (trans.) (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.).

Schopenhauer, A. 1966, The world as Will and Representation II, Payne, E.F.J. (trans.) (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.).

Soll, I. 2016. ‘Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s “Great Teacher” and “Antipode”’ in Games, K. and Richardson, J. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook on Nietzsche, (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 160-185.

Stern, T. 2019. ‘Nietzsche’s Ethics of Affirmation’ in Stern, T. (ed.), The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, (Cambridge: University Press): 351-374.

Wicks, R. 2019. ‘Schopenhauer: Nietzsche’s Antithesis and Source of Inspiration’ in Stern, T. (ed.) The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 72-97.

Young, J. 1992. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

ABBREVIATIONS

Arthur Schopenhauer

WWR I Schopenhauer, A. 1966, The world as Will and Representation I, Payne, E.F.J. (trans.) (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.).

WWR II Schopenhauer, A. 1966, The world as Will and Representation II, Payne, E.F.J. (trans.) (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.).

PP II Schopenhauer, A. 2017. Parerga and Paralipomena II, Del Caro, A. and Janaway, C. (trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

MR Schopenhauer, A. 1988, Manuscript remains, Payne, E.F.J. (trans) (Oxford: Berg).

Friedrich Nietzsche

ASC Nietzsche, F. 1967. ‘Attempt at Self Criticism’ in The Birth of Tragedy, Kaufmann, W. (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books).

HH Nietzsche, F. 2008. Human all too Human, Zimmern, H. and Cohn, P. (trans.) (St. Ives: Wordsworth Editions).

GS Nietzsche, F. 1974. The Gay Science, Kaufmann, W. (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books).

NCW Nietzsche, F. 1967. Nietzsche Contra Wagner, Kaufmann, W. (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books).

BT Nietzsche, F. 1967. The Birth of Tragedy, Kaufmann, W. (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books).

WP Nietzsche, F. 1968. The Will to Power, Kaufmann, W. and Hollingdale, R.J. (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books).

TI Nietzsche, F. 1990. Twilight of Idols, Hollingdale, R.J. (trans.) (London: Penguin books).

Z Nietzsche, F. 1982. ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, in The Portable Nietzsche, Kaufmann, W. (trans.) (London: Penguin Books).

[1] Nietzsche, F. 1982. ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, in The Portable Nietzsche, Kaufmann, W. (trans.) (London: Penguin Books). [2] Nietzsche, F. 1997. Untimely Meditations, Hollingdale, R.J. (trans.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). [3] Nietzsche, F. 2008. Human all too Human, Zimmern, H. and Cohn, P. (trans.) (St. Ives: Wordsworth Editions). 4 Janaway, C. 1998. ‘Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator’ in Janaway, C. (ed.), Willing and Nothingness (Oxford: Clarendon Press): 13-37. [5] For a more detailed discussion on Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art, see Foster (2009). [6] Nietzsche, F. 1976. Nietzsche Contra Wagner, Kaufmann, W. (trans.), (London: Penguin Books). [7] Schopenhauer, A. 1988. Manuscript Remains, Payne, E.F.J. (trans.), (Oxford: Berg). Schopenhauer goes even further and understands death as the unavoidable triumph but not as an absolute annihilation of the will and sees the existence as constant dying. For a broader discussion on this subject see Jacquette (2009). [8] Nietzsche, F. 1967. The Birth of Tragedy, Kaufmann, W. (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books). [9] For Ivan Soll, to be one’s antipode is of high importance regarding one’s nature and character: ’To view someone as being one’s antipode is not just to differ radically, with that person on some issue on another; it is to view that person as one’s opposite is what constitutes the very centre of one’s thought and being’. (2016, p. 162). [10] For further discussion on Schopenhauer’s and Christian morality, see Wicks (2019). [11] Came, D. 2009. ‘The Aesthetic Justification of Existence’, in Keith Ansell Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche, (Blackwell Publishing Ltd): 41-45. [12] Nietzsche, F. 1967. ‘Attempt at Self Criticism’ in The Birth of Tragedy, Kaufmann, W. (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books). [13] Schopenhauer, A. 2017. Parerga and Paralipomena II, Del Caro, A. and Janaway, C. (trans.), (Cambridge: University Press). [14] Leiter, B. 2018. ‘The truth is Terrible’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, vol 49. N. 2, pp. 151-173. [15] Instead of identifying themselves with their individual bodies and ephemeral nature, Nietzsche wants his readers to identify with the eternal and universal life forces that remain beyond their individual lives which overwhelm the fear of death and meaninglessness. As Wicks puts it: ‘When Nietzsche identified with the forces of life itself first-hand, he was not morally repulsed as was Schopenhauer, but was so enlivened and rejuvenated, that moral consideration surrounding the violent nature of life were overshadowed by his supreme feeling of healthiness’ (2019, p. 79). [16] Schopenhauer, A. 1966, The world as Will and Representation I, Payne, E.F.J. (trans.) (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.). [17] Schopenhauer, A. 1966, The world as Will and Representation II, Payne, E.F.J. (trans.) (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.). [18]Nussbaum, M.C. 2009. ‘Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Dionysus’ in Janaway C. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). [19] Nietzsche, F. 1968. The Will to Power, Kaufmann, W. and Hollingdale, R.J. (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books). [20] Nietzsche’s statement ‘To realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming’ encompasses the aesthetic justification of life in BT. An unavoidable artistic, creative process is the condition for self-overcoming, or becoming. For everyone willing to go on living despite the horrors of life, an illusion is necessary. Since Nietzsche understood the process of becoming as eternal and perpetual, the destruction of the previous state or stage of the individual was imminent. For that reason, he says: ‘that joy which also encompasses the joy in destruction’. Schopenhauer’s discovery of the will was to end in the realisation of unavoidable pessimism, which Young calls ‘more attractive, the more human’ (1992, p. 54), was an end in itself. Schopenhauer’s end result of discovering the will to lead to the full- blown pessimism stands in complete opposition to Nietzsche’s Dionysian, which stands for ‘the will to life rejoicing’. This is what Young also misunderstood by identifying Nietzsche’s Dionysian with Schopenhauer’s will (1992, p. 53). [21] Nehamas, A. 2002. Nietzsche: Life as Literature (London: Harvard University Press). [22] Reginster, B. 2008, The Affirmation of Life (London: Harvard University press). [23] Nietzsche, F. 1974. The Gay Science, Kaufmann, W. (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books). [24] Clark, M. 1998. ‘On Knowledge, Truth and value: Nietzsche’s Debt to Schopenhauer and the Development of his Empiricism’ in Janaway, C (ed.), Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator, (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 37-78. [25] Soll, I. 2016. ‘Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s “Great Teacher” and “Antipode”’ in Games, K. and Richardson, J. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook on Nietzsche, (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 160-185. [26] Stern, T. 2019. ‘Nietzsche’s Ethics of Affirmation’ in Stern, T. (ed.), The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, (Cambridge: University Press): 351-374.