Nietzsche's Metaphysics in the Birth of Tragedy

It is often assumed that the main assertions of the Birth of Tragedy about the Apollonian, the Dionysian, and more generally the function of art, rest on an implicit core of Schopenhauerian metaphysics, which Nietzsche would later have criticised and rejected. As stated by J. Young, there is ‘fairly wide agreement that the Birth incorporates without modification Schopenhauer’s metaphysics’ (Young 2001: 26). According to him, the real core of dispute among commentators is whether Nietzsche adopts Schopenhauer’s pessimistic conclusions about the value of life, Young’s own controversial stance on this being that ‘on the crucial question of pessimism, the Schopenhauerian assessment of the worth of human existence is (. . .) endorsed’. In this paper, I shall argue that this conclusion, based on the assumption that the Birth’s metaphysics is thoroughly Schopenhauerian, must be rejected because the premise itself is unwarranted. I am aware that this is a paradoxical claim: there are many Schopenhauerian elements in the Birth, in particular the idea that the Grundstimmung of the will is pain, or that individuation is illusory. However, if one tries to read them as supporting Nietzsche’s claims about art and its redemptive power, then many difficulties and even contradictions appear. For example, if the primal affect of the world is purely pain, as in the World as Will and Representation, how can the Dionysian, which mimics it, be both painful and pleasurable? If individuation is, as in Schopenhauer’s thought, an illusion due to the principle of sufficient reason, how can the Dionysian, which lifts this illusion and reunites us with the will, be also defined as ‘an illusion spread over things’ (BT: 109)? Along the same lines, if individuation is, again in Schopenhauerian fashion, the ‘primary cause of evil’ (BT: 74), or a ‘curse’ (BT: 71), how can the Apollonian, which glorifies it, be a desirable illusion? And if human existence is absurd suffering, how can art, which tells us, both in its Apollonian and Dionysian forms, that life is worth living ‘eternally’, be truthful, as Nietzsche claims? I shall argue that the main reason for these difficulties is not really that Nietzsche’s allegedly Schopenhauerian assumptions do not support his own conclusions about art: it is that his metaphysical assumptions are extremely complex and, in fact, often of a very unschopenhauerian nature. Indeed, if we focus on the metaphysical core of the Birth, leaving temporarily aside the question of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, more tensions and contradictions appear. These are centred mostly around three issues: the nature of the will (one or divided), the status of individuation (illusory or real) and the possibility of