Nietzsche and the Problem of Knowledge
“Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of the universe … there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history,’ but nevertheless, it was only a minute” (On Truth 79)
Of all the clever “knowing” beasts which have existed on the planet Earth, one stands out above the rest, not for his “knowing”, but for his “unknowing”. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche stood tall among great thinkers. It was Nietzsche who saw the dam of knowledge becoming too full and released the floodgates, creating room for life, not knowledge, to be filled in humanity. Nietzsche shows how humanity has lost its natural inclinations by following Socratic dialectic and believing in the mystery of the thing in-itself. It is the belief that humanity’s knowledge is absolute and eternal which Nietzsche attempts to discard. Nietzsche’s thought is a recoiling away from the thing in-itself of “meta”-physics, back to the immediate of appearance and impulses. Nietzsche is not concerned with the timeless concept of Being but with the temporality of becoming.
This essay will show Nietzsche’s disgust with Occidental thought’s obsession with knowledge. Nietzsche claims man’s quest for knowledge (which he declares is the shadow of Socrates) has led man away from the Primal Unity of nature. This essay will begin by explaining the tragedy of life as explained from the clash of natural forces: the Apollonian and the Dionysian and how a veil was cast over man with the birth of Socratic knowledge. Then, this essay will analyze the birth of metaphysics through the creation of language and how metaphysics cannot escape its anthropomorphism.
I. The Tragedy of Nature
One of the main themes in all of Nietzsche’s works is the utter meaningless of anthropological society. Man has constantly striven to produce some kind of meaning and purpose to life above the evident fact that all life is suffering. Nietzsche recounts the shrill laughter from the wise follower of Dionysus, Silenus, when captured by King Midas and asked what was most desirable for man, “Oh, wretched race of a day, children of chance and misery, why do ye compel me to say to you what it were most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is forever beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. The second best for you, however, is soon to die” (Birth of Tragedy 9). While this passage is short, it is poignant for all of Nietzsche’s work; man is but a creature of chance and subject to intense misery doomed to the apathy of nature; and while oblivion is beyond man’s reach, dying is not, for man is constantly dying and becoming anew, though he rarely realizes it. Trapped in the tragedy of nature, Nietzsche says man must learn to harness two fundamental forces of nature, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, correctly in order to justify existence in any way. This justification of nature can only happen through the art of tragedy.
A. The Apollonian and the Dionysian
Nietzsche talks a great deal about appearance and man’s relation to appearance. The word “appearance” is translated from the German word “Schein” which is related to the word “Scheinen”; Schienen means to shine, to radiate light as the sun does. In Greek mythology, Apollo is the sun of Zeus and the sun itself who sends down radiating beams which both nourish and harm the Earth below. He is the deity of light, dreams, the plastic, the static, limitation, and he is the principle of the individual who places himself high above the grounded Earth, into the sky to fly among the clouds. “The beauteous appearance of the dream-worlds, in the production of which every man is a perfect artist, is the presupposition of all plastic art” (Birth of Tragedy 2). It is important, however, to notice Apollo’s connection to dreams (the Oracle at Delphi was the priestess of Apollo who heard his wisdom through dreams) because Nietzsche says dreams are the “appearance of appearance” (Birth of Tragedy 12) . The word Scheinen also means false show, sham, or something that is not what it seems. This is especially important to understand because while the sun does provide light and reveals the contours and limits of reality, the sun also blinds and conceals reality. Apollo is the representation of the principium individuationis, of man by himself, and man is the Erscheinung (phenomenal appearance) of the secret ground of his essence; therefore, man is an illusion as well.
While Apollo was created in order to create barriers and individuals for man, Dionysus was created to break man’s barriers and return man to the Primal Unity. “Under the charms of the Dionysian not only is the covenant between man and man again established, but also estranged, hostile or subjugated nature again celebrates her reconciliation with her lost son, man” (Birth of Tragedy 4). Dionysus (literally, the Zeus of Nysa) is the god of drunkenness, dance, the temporal, the Primal Unity, and self-oblivion. Dionysus is of particular importance not just for Nietzsche, but for Greek tragedy. Dionysus is often called the twice born for his previous incarnation as Zagreus (one of many origin myths about Dionysus; though, Nietzsche references Zagreus in chapter ten of The Birth of Tragedy). Zagreus was the child of Zeus and Kore. When Hera discovered the child she sent the Titanesses to tear him limb from limb. Zeus discovered the plot against his son and cast a lightning bolt against them, but not before Zagreus was destroyed (Larousse 182). His heart, however, was saved and made into a drink which Semele drank and she became pregnant with Dionysus. Hera again interfered by convincing Semele to ask Zeus to reveal himself in his full splendor. He acquiesced and burned Semele to death; Dionysus was still alive and placed in Zeus’ thigh until he was born (Larousse 178). Dionysus is the very epitome of the tortured being; tormented by both the Titans (the children of Earth) and the Gods (the creators of man), he is trapped in the nothingness of existence, drinking himself into oblivion in order to forget the pains brought on him. Dionysus is an important reminder of the need to forget as he often kept the most forgetful beings in his company, animals. Nietzsche talks about the importance of forgetting in order to avoid illusion in his history essay, “Thus the animal lives unhistorically: for it is contained in the present, like a number without any awkward fraction left over; it does not know how to dissimulate, it conceals nothing and at every instant appears wholly as what it is; it can therefore never be anything but honest” (Untimely Meditations 61). The Dionysian is, therefore, the very torment of nature inflicted upon its creatures, forever breaking the illusion created by Apollo.
It is naive to suggest the Apollonian and the Dionysian are polar opposites, for remember they are both sons of Zeus; they are parallels that must collide in violent ways. They are also not creations of man but mere mediations through man. The author of Art, i.e. nature, uses man as pictures and artistic productions. Nietzsche says man should have the “highest dignity in our significance as works of art – for only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified” (Birth of Tragedy 19). In tragic theatre, the Apollonian man stood on the stage of a Dionysian creation and realized “his entire existence, with all its beauty and moderation, rested on a hidden substratum of suffering and of knowledge which was again disclosed to him by the Dionysian” (Birth of Tragedy 13). All this was veiled over with the arrival of Socrates and his suicidal poison: knowledge.
B. Socratic “Knowledge”
In Athens, there existed a snub-nosed man of extraordinary arrogance which had not yet been seen; his name was Socrates. He spread the poison of Socratism first to Euripides, who used it to kill Dionysus and therefore relegating Zagreus down to Hades, and then to Plato where his over sized phallus has been looming long over Western thought. It was at Delphi that Apollo whispered Socrates was the wisest man alive. And what did Socrates do with this knowledge? He dared to question it by saying he knew nothing! Instead of heeding the examples of men like Odysseus and Oedipus who were doomed for challenging the gods, he made it the subject of his very philosophy. Instead of one’s initial intuitions and drives creating while man’s thought critique, Socrates creates while his instincts beg him to listen to them, a decision which Nietzsche calls “a perfect monstrosity per defectum!” (Birth of Tragedy 54). Even more audacious than questioning nature, is Socrates’ willingness to die for his “knowledge”. “The dying Socrates became the new ideal of the noble Greek youths” (Birth of Tragedy 55). It was not Schopenhauer who created the philosophy of nihilism, but none other than Socrates. Instead of affirming life as the Dionysian man did, Socrates affirmed a tradition of static death. “What is tradition? A higher authority which one obeys, not because it commands what is useful to us, but because it commands” (Daybreak A. 9).
The Socratic proposition was “only the knowing one is virtuous”, which Euripides translates into “to be beautiful everything must be intelligible” (Birth of Tragedy 50). With this, Attic Tragedy dies by the hand of the New Attic Comedy; Euripides veils the Dionysian music (which Nietzsche considers the will of the Greeks in the sixth chapter of The Birth of Tragedy) with Socratic language. Through the “legislation of language”, all things are given designations arbitrarily (On Truth 81); “this legislation of language likewise establishes the first laws of truth” (On Truth 81). From these first truths created by man’s “intellect”, the Primal Unity of the Dionysian was lost.
II. Language and Metaphysics
With the new Apollonian/Socratic drama, man replaced the importance of music with language. For Nietzsche, this is an irreparable error for Nietzsche “observe[s] that in the poetising of the popular song, language is strained to its utmost to imitate music” (Birth of Tragedy 20). Language, which is based on the attempt to explain the Primal Unity of nature, now creates ambiguous concepts and terms in order to make a moment in time last forever. Language is mans attempt to stop time, create a static universe where things are eternally true and real. “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions” (On Truth 84). Illusions are anything but real and are anything but eternal. As was said above, humanity itself is an illusion.
B. Language as Illusion
Man created language and in his hubris, he believed it actually had some force or correlation to nature. Let man step out of his iron prison into the jungle and tell a tiger, “Stop! I am man!” His inevitable demise will come just that much quicker.
Nietzsche shows several examples of the illusion behind language and its supposed truth. He mentions specifically the arbitrariness of concepts. “Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things” (On Truth 83) Concepts are invented by man as a way to equate a word with several things. If one says one saw a leaf earlier one uses the word “leaf” to describe the specific thing one saw; however, the word “leaf” gives no more description of the leaf than that it was a leaf. What is a leaf? Are all leafs alike? Nietzsche says no. One leaf is not somehow mystically connected to another leaf. They are both separate things, inconceivably different. Language, and the concepts it creates, creates a world where he is “deemed so fixed that he might therefrom lift the rest of the world off its hinges, and make himself master of it” (Human A. 11). Nietzsche is similarly critical of logic and mathematics, with respect to the former he says, “is founded upon suppositions to which nothing in actual world corresponds”, and with respect to the latter he says, “which would certainly not have arisen if it had been known from the beginning that in Nature there are no exactly straight lines, no real circle, no absolute standard of size” (Human A. 11). Nietzsche clearly is no friend of language and the dissimulation it produces. “The less men are fettered by tradition, the greater becomes the inward activity of their motives; the greater, again, in proportion thereto, the outward restlessness, the confused flux of mankind, the polyphony of strivings” (Human A. 23). If man can escape out of the tradition of Socratism, the Apollonian barriers can be broken, and the Primal Unity of the Dionysian can be revealed again.
B. The Language of Metaphysics
After Socrates killed the Dionysian with his focus on language and reason, he created metaphysics through his pupil Plato. From Plato’s Forms to Kant’s thing in-itself, philosophers have continued to create a world (instead of allowing nature to create) somehow separate and more perfect than the real world. Nietzsche vehemently rejects this thought that man and his concepts are somehow the same as they were in the beginning. “But everything has evolved; there are no eternal facts, as there are likewise no absolute truths” (Human A. 2). For Nietzsche, there are no Eternal Forms, no thing in-itself, no substance; these are all theoretical problems which have no grounding in reality. Similarly, the ideas of the Good in-itself and the evil in-itself are determined by what is good and evil to the individual man. They are based on utility. “When one has demonstrated that a thing is of the highest utility, one has however taken not one step towards explaining its origin: that is to say, one can never employ utility to make it comprehensible that a thing must necessarily exist” (Daybreak A. 37). All metaphysics and ethics is based on its usefulness for man; how can any concept – metaphysical or otherwise – describe reality if man is the creator of it?
Anthropomorphic means ascribing human form or attributes to a being or thing not human. The word itself contradictory; it assumes there is such a form that applies to all humans. However, here is where the importance of anthropomorphism lies: the idea of some eternal form describing all humans. Metaphysics is anthropomorphic because it tries to halt all things into static eternity. Nietzsche says philosophers “overlook the fact that that picture – that which we now call human life and experience – has gradually evolved – nay, is still in the process of evolving – and therefore should not be regarded as a fixed magnitude from which a conclusion about its originator might be deduced (the sufficient cause) or even merely neglected” (Human A. 16). The picture one calls life is a constantly evolving, temporal process with no fixed conceptions or variables. Nietzsche is first and foremost a philosopher of becoming. If metaphysics cannot become temporal as well and focus on becoming, then it should be discarded.
Nietzsche appears to be a very pessimistic philosopher. However, he is only pessimistic towards the life-denying Socratism which still looms large over Occidental thought. It also seems impossible to escape reason and knowledge as man knows it. Nietzsche answers in a positive tone here: “fortunately, it is too late to reverse the development of reason, which is founded upon that belief [language]” (Human A. 11). Nietzsche believes man needs art for the proper transition from the religion man currently resides in to an actual philosophy. The specific art is tragedy in the classic Apollonian/Dionysian sense. Only when tragedy has returned man to the Primal Unity, will he be free.
Works Cited:
Guirand Félix. Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology. Prometheus Press, 1959.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Human, All Too Human: a Book for Free Spirits. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Translated by Reginald J. Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Of Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Edited by Oscar Levy. Translated by William A Haussmann, Barnes & Noble, 2006.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. Edited by Daniel Breazeale. Translated by Reginald J. Hollingdale, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014.
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