At this point I feel I've beaten the ideas in this first chapter on The Tragic to within an inch of their life, so I'll just end with a couple of quotes that summarize the main idea, and then a remark on another interesting passage.
Two quotes seem to me a basic summary of what's wrong with our view of the world, and how to fix it.
1) The non-tragic view always wants to judge life against some form of transcendent ideal. Anything which happens that does not fit with this ideal must be denied and negated, even though it has more power of reality, so to speak, than whatever ideal condition is not happening. This is what Deleuze means by saying that the ascetic ideal introduces a contradiction in to the will which separates what it can do from what is should do. It invents an interior will which must be disciplined into inaction, and punished after the fact. For this, it substitutes an 'exterior' will which is nothing but its action.
For a long time we have only been able to think in terms of ressentiment and bad conscience. We have had no other ideal but the ascetic ideal. We have opposed knowledge to life in order to judge life, in order to make it something blameworthy, responsible or erroneous. We turned will into something bad, something stricken by a basic contradiction: we have said that it must be rectified, restrained, limited and even denied and suppressed. It was only any good at this price. (NP, 35)
2) We reverse this tired worldview by affirming everything, disciplining nothing. All will creates. It is creation, force, and power. When we affirm that the will (and not necessarily our will alone) simply operates, that its outcomes are part of chance, we break the spell of the ascetic ideal. We abandon our craving for its to be different and affirm the tragic as joyful. Just this is the cessation of suffering.
According to Nietzsche it has never been understood that the tragic = the joyful. This is another way of putting the great equation: to will = to create. We have not understood that the tragic is pure and multiple positivity, dynamic gaeity. Affirmation is tragic because it affirms chance and the necessity of chance; because it affirms multiplicity and the unity of multiplicity. (NP, 36)
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If we understand existentialism as a humanism (as Sartre famously did), then we must understand that Nietzsche was not an existentialist. The freedom and affirmation he is talking about do not come from some mystical interiority, but rather from something more akin to a mystical exteriority. His idea of the way meaning arises from a fundamentally meaningless existence doesn't involve the anxiety of a fully formed individual who finds themselves somehow dumped into the world, as if God had kidnapped and blindfolded us before depositing us on the stage of Waiting For Godot. Instead, meaning arises only when the meaninglessness is affirmed completely. This happens only when we empty even the interiority of our craving for meaning, and affirm its exteriority, its constructed-ness, its randomness. Instead of conceiving of this craving as a force which disciplines the chaos of life, we affirm that it too is another aspect of that life affirming itself, and affirming us along the way. Delueze argues that this is a fundamentally different perspective than other existentialists who might be superficially similar to Nietzsche and are often discussed in the same breath.
It is not sufficient to ask: "What does the other think, is this comparable to what Nietzsche thinks?" Rather we must ask: "How does this other think? And how much ressentiment and bad conscience remains in his thought? The ascetic ideal, the spirit of revenge, do they continue to exist in his way of understanding tragedy?" Pascal, Kierkegaard and Chestov, knew, with genius, how to take criticism further than ever before. They suspended morality, they reversed reason but, ensnared in ressentiment, they still drew their strength from the ascetic ideal. They were the poets of this ideal. What they oppose to morality, to reason, is still this ideal in which reason is immersed, this mystical body in which it takes root, interiority — the spider. In order to philosophise they need all the resources and the guiding thread of interiority, anguish, wailing, guilt, all the forms of dissatisfaction. (NP, 36)
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