Thus spoke Zarathustra.
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Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche. Gallimard, 449 pages.
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Whereas in all countries we see a veritable flourishing of books on Nietzsche, the publication of the complete works in the great edition of Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari continues actively. To the edition of Walter de Gruyter in Berlin, a total of around thirty volumes are projected, divided into eight parts. Always with Walter de Gruyter, Colli and Montinari have initiated a considerable œuvre: the publication of the entire correspondence of Nietzsche in some twenty volumes separated into three chronological parts (1844–1869, 1869–1879, and 1880–1889). The first volume of this edition, named Kritische Gesamtausgabe von Nietzsches Briefwechsel (KGB)216 was released in 1975; it covers the period 1849–1864.
In Nietzsche et la critique du christianisme (Cerf, 1974),217 Paul Valadier presents, from a Christian point of view, an in-depth analysis (without concessions to various attempts at the ‘recovery’ of Nietzschean thought) of an important aspect of Nietzsche’s work.
In Nietzsche: finalisme et histoire (Copernic, 1977),218 Pierre Chassard focuses more particularly on Nietzsche’s ‘anti-providentialism’. He summarises the Nietzschean philosophy of history in these terms: ‘It demystifies and shows that the universe is not subjected to any omnipotence that would impose an end on it, and that men themselves make history. It reveals this, in its essential character, as resulting from a struggle between value systems expressing different human types, needs, and the interests of specific powers. It attempts to overcome an effective nihilism without prescribing mental evasion into the imaginary beyond, without recommending the de-realisation of the real, but by suggesting the acceptance of a world which does not have reason, and even to want it without reason. It attempts to give European history, depicted as a process of organic decadence ascribed to the Judaeo-Christian movement, a positive orientation by selection and multiplication of a type of man of great intellectuality and of strong will. It conceives, finally, a doctrine supposedly able to effectuate this vital ascension by replacing the so-called weakening values with values of increasing strength, and by substituting the morality that creates slaves with a morality that liberates’.
The Return of Tragedy
Karl Jaspers writes: ‘Every action brings into this world consequences which the agent had not suspected’ (Philosophie, 1932). With these words alone, tragedy is revealed. At the same time it strips away the puerile illusion of a ‘predictable’ whole.219
In Le retour du tragique,220 Jean-Marie Domenach explains: ‘The tragic departs from tragedy, since it returns to provoke philosophical reflection and political action to the point that we can consider the most active philosophies and the most decisive revolutions of the modern era as efforts for confronting a defiance initiated twenty five centuries ago under the Greek sky’.
A great connoisseur of pre-Hellenic and proto-historic Greece, archaeologist Guy Rachet, in La tragédie grecque,221 recounts how this defiance was launched.
Friedrich Nietzsche saw in tragedy the meeting and culmination of two great currents constitutive of Greek genius: Apollonian spirit, luminous and measured, and Dionysian instinct, wild and unchained — reason and excess (The Birth of Tragedy, 1878). He also connected tragedy to the ‘spirit of music’ as well as the dithyramb, by insisting on the importance of choirs. ‘This vision’, says Rachet, ‘remains fruitful with regards to its psychological implications’.
Mircea Eliade, for his part, has emphasised the importance of religious myth, which tragedy allows us to refresh by re-presenting it at any moment.
One thing is certain: of Doric origin, tragedy has rapidly been transplanted in Attica, where it has found its chosen home. Unfortunately, many classical pieces have not come down to us, whether because they were lost, or because they were destroyed after the coming of Christianity. We only know seven tragedies by Aeschylus, who wrote eighty, and seven by Sophocles, to whom more than 120 are attributed.
Greek tragedy is first of all a religious representation: it addresses itself to spectators ‘linked’ together by the same conception of the world.222
It draws its inspiration from the old legendary sources of the Hellenes. The destinies of Hector, Odysseus, Achilles, Patroclus, and Iphigenia, are tragic destinies: the personages of tragedy are less the gods themselves than the intimate life of the heroes. ‘In the only tragedy that situates itself in the world of the gods’, remarks Rachet, ‘we find a confrontation between a god, Zeus, and a being who, immortality aside, assumes the character of a civilising hero: Prometheus’.
Misconduct, failure, crime, and malediction are the great dramatic wellsprings of this ‘literary’ genre, for which the cultural history of humanity provides no equivalent.
From Greece to Germania
The oracle or diviner plays an essential role: they are intermediaries between the visible and the hidden. Through them, the law is unveiled and the drama congeals. The hero affirms himself. Prometheus defies the gods. Oedipus refuses to believe what the diviner Tiresias reveals to him. Creon remains obstinate in his decisions. Then the deus ex machina intervenes, that is to say, the god who descends upon the mechane in order to unravel a situation that has become inextricable.
Nature is also always present: in Aeschylus, the waves, the rivers, and all the elements weep over the sufferings of Prometheus.
Guy Rachet restricts himself to the analysis of only Greek tragedy. But the tragic sentiment is a constant of the entire European spirit. We even note an astonishing parallelism between ancient Greece and, for example, ancient Germania. In Scandinavian mythology, the gods themselves end by dying: the end of this world is also their loss. ‘If the gods are ultimately powerless before evil’, observes Edith Hamilton, ‘men and women must be even more so’ (Mythologies, Marabout).
Political action and literature, history, and philosophy thus interweave in an interior drama that pivots upon a contradiction. The universe is immense and infinite. Man is ephemeral and limited. Bringing this opposition clearly into awareness, yet struggling against what is inexorable, man expresses the tragic sentiment of life. Here we discover the idea of the Eternal Return: tragedy re-presents what we always await. (It is this, Domenach emphasises, which introduces it to history).
In relation to the universe, man becomes at once contained and containing: contained by his presence, containing by his consciousness. Not having duration, he strives to enjoy the intensity.
In the clear consciousness of this contradiction between our weakness (and the inevitability of our end) on one hand, and on the other, the strength that bestows upon us the power to historicise our existence — a power that we allow to dominate the world by giving it a form — Jules Monnerot, author of an admirable study on Les lois du tragique, sees an ‘anthropological differential’ characteristic of European man.
Utilitarian morality is absent from tragedy. Medea, having provoked the death of Creon and killed his children, escapes to Athens. Helen, who caused the misfortune of the Greeks and Trojans, completes her life happily at Sparta. ‘Virtue’, by contrast, conducts Antigone and Hippolytus to death.
The value of tragic theatre is also more instructive than morality. ‘The power of the soul’, writes Guy Rachet, ‘this height from which events and its own destiny are viewed, this ideal that has been forged, which belongs to us and which we put all our efforts towards accomplishing, this virtue certainly appears as a model to imitate’.
Domenach observes: ‘Good and Evil. Provisional vocabulary that must be discarded. Tragedy reduces us to these overly simplistic distinctions’. The tragic sentiment is not a ‘moral’ affair, but a level of being, of quality in destiny.
A Rage to Live Inhabits Beings
Destiny: ‘This conqueror who is not a character’ (Jules Monnerot). The entirety of tragedy is dominated by this notion; not the resignation of the Orient, but the fatum of the Romans. In the piece by
Sophocles, it is ‘necessary’ that Oedipus kill his father and unite with his mother. It is ‘necessary’ that the curse of the Atrides be fulfilled, etc. And yet the hero, warned of the lot that is reserved for him, conscious that he cannot escape, acts as if he can escape.
‘The sacred among the ancient Germans’, writes Régis Boyer, ‘is Destiny, the sense of Destiny, the countless configurations that Destiny takes’. He adds: ‘The rock carvings of Bohuslän, the Merseburg spells, and the Edda of Snorri agree on this point: higher than the gods and the myths, stronger than time and the death over which it presides, looms Destiny. Nowhere does this obsession appear better than in the heroic Nibelungenlied-Völsunga Saga-Edda complex: not a single character is found who does not know his lot in advance, everything has been announced in detail, everything will be realised in detail. If we maintain a flat view of things, the whole Germanic religion appears as an enormous, overwhelming absurdity … what good is living? Wouldn’t a frank nihilism be better? Now here is the miracle: the entire Germanic universe violently answers no. A rage to live inhabits beings. The spirit of struggle (vighugr) is upon them. Cowardice is infamy; suicide, unknown; scepticism, despicable (…) We see here the most original characteristic, the most astonishingly modern, of Germanic paganism: man does not submit to his fate, he does not attend his destiny as an interested but foreign spectator, it is given to him to accept and to accomplish — to take charge of it, on his own’ (Les religions de l’Europe du nord. Fayard-Denoël, 1974).223
In the Nordic saga of Kara Halfdansdatter, the hero is protected by a swan which flies above him during battle. But one day, while fighting, he raises his sword so high that he kills the animal. That day, his destiny is severed.
The same sentiment impregnates the poems of Homer. In the Iliad, Helen says to Hector: ‘Zeus has fashioned a hard fate for us so that we will be sung about by men to come’. We discover an echo in Herodotus and the pre-Socratic philosophers. Heraclitus declares: ‘Man’s character is his destiny’.
The individual upon whom destiny dwells fulfils its radical ‘mission’, which is perhaps the ultimate form of realism. The works that Clément Rosset (La philosophie tragique. PUD, 1960)224 and George Steiner (La mort de la tragédie. Seuil, 1965)225 have consecrated to it show that the tragic vision, the worldview that is connected to it, has the cold clarity of absolute lucidity.
But tragedy only exists, of course, if the hero is the artisan of his own loss. ‘A man alone against everything’, writes Jules Monnerot, ‘is not necessarily tragic. He becomes tragic when “the enemy” is also within him’. Tragic action is inscribed within and against uncertainty. (Only the anti-tragic turns this uncertainty into meaninglessness; lack of meaning is only identified with the world’s arbitrariness for the man doomed to suffer it). According to Jaspers, the tragic hero enters ‘limit-situations’ with open eyes. These ‘limit-situations’ (Tod, Leiden, Kampf, Schuld, in the view of Jaspers)226 ensure that he is never defeated by their circumstances.
In order to be at the height of his destiny, the tragic hero is therefore accomplished in action. The certitude of final defeat is not a reason for him to surrender. On the contrary. If God is dead, if the world is a chaos in which only a voluntary action can make an organised cosmos, then man is alone. Alone to undertake and construct. Alone, since he is both subject and object of himself. It is only by relation to himself, by relation to the cultural and social ensembles in which he includes himself, which he can define the terms of a new objectivity — all while knowing, precisely, that this objectivity is but a convention produced by his will, that it has no absolute value other than that given by space-time. In this sense, we can say of the world today that by ruining the idea of a universal reason (which, in the previous belief, automatically gave a meaning to life), it has also provoked the existential void above which tragic thought can develop itself anew. To be conscious that death is inevitable, while doing everything to become immortal. To impose oneself on the inexorable by willing that which others are content (at best) to accept. To choose one form of life among a thousand other possible forms. To deeply feel both the ultimate futility of all action upon things, and the necessity of undertaking this action so as not to decay, etc.
The Conscious Will of What Must Be
The best die, also. But their name, once it has been portrayed, does not die: it is by their example that they reach eternity. For the hero, life is a destiny which cannot be stolen from them. The only freedom that they possess is to meet their requirements with or without honour. In height and affirmation, or baseness and anonymity.
In the song of the Nibelungen, Gunnar (Günther) takes himself to the court of Atli (Attila), even though he knows full well that an ambush awaits him. Heroism consists in pursuing a goal in regards to which we do not matter.
A Roman historian relates that in the first century the Cimbrians, threatened by a tidal wave, entered the water, sword in hand, to fight the sea. A model of excess.
The tragic maxim par excellence is that of Taciturnus: ‘One need not hope in order to undertake, nor succeed in order to persevere’. It expresses itself in the celebrated engraving by Dürer: Knight, death, and the devil.
The tragic man is the one who loves the event for the event. He prefers situations, even bad ones, where something happens, to situations, even good ones, where nothing happens. He loves what happens. Amor fati, this maxim from Nietzsche, Montherlant has made his own. It is not a taste for the worst, nor simple acceptance of fate. It is the tenacious and conscious will of that which must be.
And that which must be is chance as much as necessity: ‘Unlike the sage who eliminates it, the tactician who calculates it’, writes Domenach, ‘the Nietzschean hero throws himself wholly and immediately into chance’. He answers the challenge of death with the play of life.
With this behaviour, an intimacy with the world ensues, which reveals itself as a source of joy. For Nietzsche, who opposes Dionysus to Socrates, tragedy is worth the affirmations that it engenders, which create values. ‘What does it matter if they conflict’, summarises Domenach, ‘if they are spoken from the viewpoint of life!’ Tragedy is ‘the joy which is born of multiple affirmation’. It is the consciousness wrested from the incompatibilities of being and the contradictions of becoming.
Thus, tragic man is the complete opposite of the man of quantity beloved by ‘reductionist’ theoreticians. In essence, he escapes the reassuring analyses of the ‘human sciences’. These only trace an illusory curve: that which belongs to the mass. It remains silent on the exemplary few destined to be recorded in counterpoint.
That which tragedy brings into play cannot be measured by statistics. ‘Nietzsche and Hegel have equally asserted’, writes Domenach, ‘that there is no “science of man”. There is only history of man, who contains and overcomes all science’.
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La tragédie grecque, a study by Guy Rachet. Payot, 285 pages.
Le retour du tragique, a study by Jean-Marie Domenach. Seuil, 300 pages.
Les lois du tragique, a study by Jules Monnerot. PUF, 128 pages.227
The World as Chaos
Either an order that exists in the universe, and the task of man is to conform himself to it: the establishment of public order is thus fused with the search for truth, and the essence of politics comes down to morality; or the universe is chaos, and the task of man is to attempt to give it form.
If there was a ‘natural order’, values and forms would be the same in all times and all places. Without reigniting the argument for Universals, it suffices to note that historical experience shows this is not the case. There exists a general relativity of lifestyles, ideas, moral regulations, aesthetic aspirations, etc. — and these forms are specifically human products.
Ernst Jünger said that ‘at the centre of the cosmos, power is no longer sovereign, but anonymous’. To speak the language of Hobbes: the state of nature is civil war. The world is chaos.
A young philosopher by
the name of Clément Rosset, thirty-nine years of age, specialising in Schopenhauer and Spinoza, teaches at the Faculty of Literature and Humanities in Nice. In 1965 he published a Lettre sur les chimpanzés through Gallimard,228 which attracted considerable attention: a pastiche of social and Christian ‘humanism’, this advocacy for the recognition of the ‘rights’ of chimpanzees also became a mockery of Rousseau, Sartre, and Teilhard de Chardin. Since then, Clément Rosset has also written La philosophie tragique, Le monde et ses remèdes, Schopenhauer, philosophe de l’absurde (PUF), and under the pseudonym Roger Crémant, a vigorous pamphlet: Les matinées structuralistes (Laffont).229
In La logique du pire,230 he proposes a worldview that rigorously contradicts the vision of Plotinus, for it contrasts the plural reality of a world of nuances, differences, and variety to ideologies that attempt to bring everything back to the one. This leads him to resume and to deepen the theme of tragic philosophy.
‘What must be said and thought above all’, he writes, ‘is the tragic’.
Rarely taken into consideration, and even more rarely integrated, tragic philosophy is used to unveil the ‘fundamental chaos’ and the true quality of reality generally concealed under the reassuring discourse of ‘ideologies of happiness’ and doctrines of consolation.
Tragic thinkers are the ‘logicians of the worst’. ‘To succeed to think the worst’ is their preoccupation.
In the history of philosophy, tragic thought has primarily undergone critiques bearing on its most superficial aspects. Those who contradict it thus avoid going to the heart of it. An example cited by Rosset is the attitude of Plato faced with his opponents, the Sophists. That which Plato, father of idealism, fears among those who are mocked by the ‘truth’, is their tragic conception of man’s nature and of his relations with the universe. However, in the Protagoras, he does not attack their scepticism, but their alleged vanity. Projecting upon them the inherent vice of his philosophy, sophistry, he thus reveals himself a ‘calumniator of genius’.
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