Nietzsche on the cross: the defence of personal freedom in the birth of tragedy.

• Author: Borody, Wayne A.

Appropriating the Mask of Apostasy

Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word a mask. In his later writings, Friedrich Nietzsche often reflects on what he considers to be the significance of his philosophy, especially since it had not received serious academic interest at the time, except, that is, among a coterie of close friends and admirers. The quote above is just such a self-reflection, which comes near the end of Beyond Good and Evil (1886). The quote appears in aphorism 289, in which Nietzsche, who at this time was fond of referring to himself as "the hermit of Sils Maria," describes the silently concealed "philosophy" of the hermit as "more profound, deep and dangerous" than it appears on the surface: "his concepts themselves at last acquire a characteristic twilight colour, a smell of the depths and of must, something incommunicable and reluctant which blows cold on every passer-by." (1) The one who "has sat alone with his soul day and night, year in year out, in confidential discord and discourse" encounters the cold incommunicability of an abyss, "an abyss behind every ground, beneath every foundation." (2) The act of representing this abyss in writing, claims Nietzsche, is an act of concealment: the thinker masks the abyss with words. As a lover of this mask, Nietzsche adopted a variety of mytho-philosophical personae during the fifteen-year period of his active writing life, beginning with his Dionysian self-personification in his earliest work, the Birth of Tragedy, to his Zarathustrian personification in his last works. Just prior to his total mental collapse, Nietzsche developed a penchant for describing his writings as "dynamite" (which had only recently been invented); looking back on his writings in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche quite literally believed that he had effectively demolished--at least as far as intellectual integrity is concerned--the ideological foundations of Christianity and Platonism--which he considered to be the primary forces of devolution in modern Western culture.

It goes without saying that Nietzsche's use of the metaphor of dynamite to describe his writings was prescient. Whether it was with the sartorially plumed-out Nazi brass who milled around the porcine-figured Elizabeth at the Nietzsche Archives, or with all the Franz Kafkas of Europe writing through the silence of caffeinated nights, the "explosion" was a historical fact. It echoed, re-echoed, and continues to echo, even when only a faint or haunting ringing in the ears. Such is it heard, although, as it is generally acknowledged, something else occurred along with the echo: Nietzsche's celebrated attack on the foundations and overall project of Western culture coterminously self-implodes into a morass of philosophical confusion and ineffectuality. Quid pro quo, Nietzsche, in his Herculean struggle against the myriad of cultural forces he considered harmful to the healthy human soul, adopts the same (albeit metamorphosed) ethical and philosophical strategies he so vehemently criticizes in his opponents. The unfortunately most telling example of this is his de rigueur ethic of resentfulness, an ethic that he himself so loathes in "ressentiment morality." As a perceived victim of the moral and psychological abuses of nineteenth century Euro-Germanic Christian culture, Nietzsche, unfortunately, embraced the Old Story: "I was abused; ergo, I can abuse." Thus began Nietzsche's philosophical development, which was largely shaped by this dialectic of the victim-turned-victimizer, masked as it was by the rhetoric of the apostate. This denunciatory apostasy was clearly at work in the Birth of Tragedy. In what follows, however, I will attempt to separate, within the confines of the Birth of Tragedy, this grotesquely convoluted mask of the denunciating apostate from the underlying argument in the book: a strong argument strongly in defence of personal freedom

The particular genre of Nietzsche's apostasy and the particular type of apostate that he was can best be described as a variation of the prototype "Christian, prophetic-messianic." In a deja vu of heightened polemics, Nietzsche criticizes the institution of Christianity as tropologically as Christ had criticized the institution of Judaism. (3) In the Birth of Tragedy, the young Nietzsche messianically envisions a promised land aestheticized as a Euro-aboriginal, Dionysian Kunst-Welt of total individuality--in short, as a utopian cosmos woven out of the Self qua Ur-Self of the Romantic movement. In this context, as one of the essential "masking" or "concealing" strategies he employs in the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche etiologically focuses on Hellenistic rationalistic optimism (idealized by the so-called Dionysian-destroying likes of Euripides and Socrates) in his attack on nineteenth century Euro-Germanic culture, when it is clear that the subtext and driving force behind this attack is Christianity. Although Nietzsche had once claimed that "Christianity is Platonism for the People," the fuel in his vitriolic attack on modern Western culture in the Birth of Tragedy evolves out of what he later came to call his "Curse on Christianity." Platonism is simply a footnote in his critique of Christianity, insofar as Christianity historically appropriated Greco/Platonic rationalism in its theological and philosophical self-articulation. In-deed, for the later Nietzsche, Plato is just "an antecedent Christian," a "Higher Swindler" who had studied with the Egyptian priests ("or with the Jews in Egypt?"). (4) Socrates and Plato, Nietzsche claims, simply offer "the bridge to the cross," a bridge Nietzsche set out to destroy and a cross he chose both to denounce and, ironically, to bear.

The "Curse on Christianity" Prefigured in the Birth of Tragedy

In his apostatizing role in the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche is, however, very careful how he masks his anti-Christian sentiments and his vision of a de-Christianized European culture. Clearly, in this work, he was not ready to "come out of the closet" with what he later declaimed as his Curse. In a "Critical Backward Glance," Nietzsche's preface to the second edition of the Birth of Tragedy, written some fourteen years after the first edition, Nietzsche self-deprecatingly criticizes the Birth of Tragedy for containing all the faults of a first book "in the worst sense of that term as badly written, clumsy, embarrassing." (5) However, of most interest in this preface is Nietzsche's acknowledgement that the Birth of Tragedy harbours a "consistently cautious and hostile silence about Christianity." (6) He acknowledges that "the purely aesthetic exegesis and justification of the world" (7) propounded in the Birth of Tragedy was meant to serve as a counter-doctrine to Christianity: "my instinct turned against morality at the time I wrote this questionable book; as an advocate of life my instinct invented for itself a fundamentally opposed doctrine and counter-evaluation of life, a purely artistic one, an anti-Christian one." (8) However, in this second preface, Nietzsche does not explain why he chose to remain silent about the anti-Christian subtext of the Birth of Tragedy. (9) Nor, years later, in Ecce Homo, does he address this central question regarding the motivations behind the silence of the anti-Christian subtext of the Birth of Tragedy, except to reiterate his earlier observation concerning the "profound and hostile silence with regard to Christianity throughout the book." (10) However, in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche now claims to offer some proof of the anti-Christian subtext of the Birth of Tragedy: "In one place the Christian priests are alluded to as a 'malicious species of dwarfs,' as 'subterraneans' ... " (11) Nietzsche is here referring to section 24, near the end of the Birth of Tragedy, which does in fact appear to be a cryptic reference to Christianity. More telling than this reference, however, would have been Nietzsche's framing of the Aryan consciousness in opposition to the Semitic, when he discusses the difference between the Aryan and Semitic myths of the Fall. While he claims that the two myths function as "brother and sister," he clearly aligns his own Dionysian philosophy with the Aryan. We know that, as early as 1865, six years before the publication of the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had already openly renounced his Christian faith. Although he had enrolled in the University of Bonn as a student of theology, he quickly abandoned his theological studies. In 1865, at the age of 21, Nietzsche writes to his sister Elizabeth (who at the time was pleading with him to abandon his newly found apostasy), and bluntly says:

Is it the most important thing to arrive at that particular view of God, world and reconciliation that makes us feel most comfortable? Is not the true inquirer totally indifferent to what the result of his inquiries may be? For, when we inquire, are we seeking for rest, peace, happiness? No, only for truth, even though it be in the highest degree ugly and repellent. Here the...