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PARTISAN REVIEW
enly paradise, a worldly happiness, or an ideal of personal au–
tonomy, to which the justification or explanation can refer. For
Nietzsche, by contrast, tragedy enacts an action that carries its
justification within itself. Like James, Nietzsche demanded that
tragedy have a revolutionary capacity-the capacity to "make"
life, to create new social, cultural, and aesthetic forms. For this
purpose, it must have no
fixed
moral or epistemological bound.
The concept of tragedy Nietzsche proposed in
The Birth
of
Tragedy
as an alternative to the tragedy of rationalization was pes–
simistic (influenced by Schopenhauer) and dualistic, revolving
around the conflict between the Apollonian principle of individ–
uation and poetic illusion and the Dionysian principle of oneness
and aesthetic redemption through music. The general argument
of
The Birth of Tragedy
is of little concern here. Suffice to say that
the mature Nietzsche severely criticized his argument (in a later
preface) because it appealed to the "metaphysical comfort" that
tragedy could provide-an appeal sharply at odds with the
polemic against justification and explanation that characterizes
other sections of the work.
In certain respects, Nietzsche's thinking in
The Birth
of
Tragedy
parallels that of James in his early and middle period
works,
Roderick Hudson
and
The Princess Casamassima.
These works
are dualistic (in that both portray a character who is torn apart
psychically by opposite, irreconcilable forces) and pessimistic
(in that both characters commit suicide at the end of the novels).
Although among the more depressing of James's works, neither
are "tragic" in the way the later novels are because in them the
struggle for freedom is to a large extent a struggle against social
forms and conditions. In both cases, the idea (if not the reality) of
personal autonomy is preserved and serves to justify and explain
the fates of the characters. Like Nietzsche in
The Birth of Tragedy,
James at this stage was still partly in the grip of a metaphysical
aesthetic that derives ultimately from Kant's autonomous self.
In Nietzsche and James's later works, a different conception
of tragedy emerges. Nietzsche called this new conception
"affirmative" (in part to distinguish it from his earlier
Schopenhauerian ideas). It centers around an avowedly moral–
though hardly moralistic-category, the Will to Power.
