Nietzsche's Dionysian Pessimism: Aeschylus's Ecstatic and Aesthetic Challenge

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche's last piece of written work which surveys the books that became representative of his philosophies, he credited The Birth of Tragedy, his first book-length essay, as having accomplished the following:

The two decisive innovations of the book are, first, its understanding of the Dionysian phenomenon among the Greeks: for the first time, a psychological analysis of this phenomenon is offered, and it is considered as one root of the whole of Greek art. The other is the understanding of Socratism: Socrates is recognized for the first time as an instrument of Greek disintegration, as a typical decadent. “Rationality” against instinct. “Rationality” at any price as a dangerous force that undermines life! (Nietzsche Ecce 19)

In other words, it was after the Birth that we understood Greek tragedy as a blend of Dionysian release and Apollonian control. That Greek tragedy is a masked and orderly representation of the elements in life towards which no logic or sense can be applied, in which the mask carries the face and the orderly expression only carries the untamed message. In every sense of the word then, the tragedy RE-presents what it presents.

Prior to Nietzsche’s “innovations,” tragedy was mistook for the orderly representation in which it appears to carry some sort of moral imperative, teach its audience a lesson, and is purely Apollonian. In that sense, tragedy was much more than what was realized by theorists, and Nietzsche ought to be credited as having discovered the full magnitude of it meaning. With this theoretical framework, Nietzsche criticizes the works of Sophocles and Euripides because they force a logical explanation of the plotline and a moral weight into tragedy (itself representative of the illogicality and amorality of life). It is the same to say that their works demand that their audience accept the neat plot (with its moral undertone) and poetic, orderly lines as fundamentally the same as life.

Nietzsche’s notion of the Dionysian pessimism is not the same pessimism of our modern understanding with its implications of a psychological condition. It is to say that life and the forces it entails are random, powerful, and irrespective to producing harm or help to those who live. At the same time, however, Nietzsche urges us to embrace this, impulses and calculations alike, through which we discover also, the full magnitude of what it means to be alive.

One Greek tragedian that has artistically brought to life tragedy as Nietzsche philosophically outlined is Aeschylus. In fact, the character of Orestes is literarily symbolic of Nietzsche’s mixture of Apollo and Dionysus. For Apollo’s share, Orestes embarks on his mission of avenging his father’s death at the reassurance by the god that he will be protected from his crime of matricide. Orestes, indeed, was told to “‘gore them like a bull! […] ‘or pay their debt/with your own life, one long career of grief’” (Aeschylus 191). The implication here is that he would suffer only if he did not kill his mother. In the Birth, Nietzsche writes of Prometheus (Aeschylus’s version): “strong in his defiant belief that he could create men and, at the least, destroy Olympian gods; this he was able to do by virtue of his superior wisdom, which, to be sure, he must atone for by eternal suffering” (63). Orestes, too, possesses this “strong defiant belief” although not initially, but bolstered by his sister and the prophecy of Apollo. A more obvious parallel to the Promethean model is when Orestes says in the Eumenides: “I have suffered into truth” (Aeschylus 243). This is the Nietzschean primal pain which brings the sufferer closer to the human truth shared- the “primal unity”. Agamemnon, Clytaemenstra and Orestes suffer alike, each for the murder of his daughter, her husband and his mother. This makes Aeschylus’s work literarily (and literally!) Nietzsche’s definition of “sublime,” that is, “the subjugation of terror by means of art” (BOT 52).

The fate of Orestes in the Eumenides especially exemplifies the defining elements of Nietzsche’s argument. When questioned about committing matricide at Apollo’s command, Orestes tells the leader of the jury “…to this hour I have no regrets” (Aeschylus 257), as in, through suffering he did not derive regret. This is the “Dionysian pessimism” that actually rescued the Greeks from their collective depression. Before the birth of tragedy, the Greeks marginally escaped the terrors of living by a rugged, patchy system of faith invented on a need-basis. “In order to live at all the Greeks had to construct these deities” (Nietzsche BOT 30). It is after the evolution of the satyr chorus into Apollonian/Dionysian tragedy that something became that could at once encompass the ecstatic and the aesthetic elements of life and by that merit alone, explain it. As it turns out, life does not need to be morally or logically coherent Socrates, Sophocles and Euripides seemed to believe, and most often is not. This is the core of Nietzsche’s criticism of these men’s works; also the primary reason he champions Aeschylus as a true tragedian.

Insofar as Aeschylus’s stylistic approach as a tragedian, much of it, especially in the Eumenides, blends seamlessly with what Nietzsche’s framework demands.. A good example is the Furies, who, like the Satyr, contain their wild and untamed message in neat, sung lines. The imagery invoked by these poetic lines, according to Nietzsche, reflects the Apollonian element of Greek tragedy, and the musicality of them reflects the Dionysian. In this way, the “Apollonian veil” has succeeded in subduing but not canceling out or erasing the Dionysian (or basically human) elements of life.

In the end, however, what causes Aeschylus’s creative works to nearly perfectly echo Nietzsche’s critical voice occurs on a transcendent or philosophical level (that is, on the level of Nietzsche, not Aeschylus). It is their shared belief in the potential of the human life which has made art and philosophy survive the toll of time. Because of potential, given enough inspiration, becomes worth. One that practices art has potential. One that lives art has worth. This is what Nietzsche’s Dionysian pessimist is, and is what he meant when he said “[n]o longer the artist, [man] has himself become a work of art” (BOT 24).