Michael Cole

13 November 2006
GOVT 520 – Dr. M. Feit

Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God1 in The Gay Science

marks one of the most dramatic moments in Western philosophy, but it is not a powerful

enough tool to propel the larger philosophical project of developing an original ethos of

happiness. The death of God grants Nietzsche creative space to extend his thought

beyond the boundaries of Christian moral traditions, but religion’s shadow2 remains cast

upon critical intellectual resources (i.e. the Classical tradition), which for Nietzsche’s

purposes drains them of the richness required to articulate and lend currency to his work.

From the outset, Nietzsche enjoins his readers to recall their Greek roots and learn from

their example how to live happily.3 However, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche ascribes to

the European Classical tradition an Apollonian bias that renders it amenable to a

Christian ethos. He therefore submits the complementary influence of Dionysus as a

source of depth and vigor to accommodate the needs of post-Christian man. The effects

cannot be limited to intellectual circles: reconstruction of the Classical tradition has the

potential to affect a second Renaissance.

Nietzsche’s oeuvre consists in part of his search to understand and attain

happiness. In The Gay Science, happiness is related to health and power, and placed in

opposition to morality and truth.

I am still waiting for a philosophical physician in the exceptional sense of that word –

one who has to pursue the problem of the total health of a people, time, race or of

humanity … to risk the proposition: what was at stake in all philosophizing hitherto

was not at all truth but something else – let us say, health, future, growth, power life.4
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Happiness assumes grand proportions as Nietzsche considers the possible scale and

content of human emotion freed from constraining conventions such as sin and morality.

He concludes that a very high (though possibly only theoretical) form of happiness,

which he calls humaneness, is attained when one “manages to experience the history of

humanity as a whole as his own history,” including the most acute levels of pain and

joy.i5 The highly moral sense of pity, which is central to Christianity, acts as a palliative

in witnesses to pain, belittles the humanity of witness and sufferer, and denies real

happiness on the scale of humaneness by stunting the emotional capacity at the level of

comfort.ii6

Each individual’s happiness requires that he should passionately engage what is

most natural for him, and create the character and life he imagines is best. Nietzsche

rejects the Christian propositions that life is so full of suffering that mankind should

endeavor to earn salvation,7 and notes that happiness is often accompanied by pain and

dulled by comfort.8 For example, the exertions of sport, war and seafaring satisfy the

heroic character.9 Nietzsche rejects the value of self-control, or the suppression of

passions, because the unheeded instinct to explore and exert oneself inhibits happiness as

well as potential.10 He understands human happiness to be woven together with man’s

creative faculty, and calls the production of character “a great and fine art.”11

It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature

and then fit them into an artistic plan … For one thing is needful: that a human being

should attain satisfaction with himself.12

i
The person who attains humaneness is attributed with god-like qualities.
ii
Nietzsche ascribes to Christians an understanding of pain as the opposite of comfort, and says Christian
morality prefers the latter to any benefits of the former.
 3

It follows that Nietzsche encourages the rejection of popular concerns and values,

resistance to the need for strangers’ approval, and as much seclusion as is necessary to

live for oneself.13 In addition to immorality and acuteness of feeling, happiness depends

on a thoroughly exercised individualism, vigor, and creativity. The search for happiness

as he understood it was one of Nietzsche’s life-long philosophical projects, but it was not

an existential endeavor: morality militated against human happiness, and it contained

Christian and Classical elements.

As a Classicist, Nietzsche was acutely aware of the inheritance left to philosophy

by the Greeks and the use to which thinkers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment,

and Romantics in his own time put it. Western intellectuals edited the Greeks’ scientific

and cultural heritage to accord with conventional morality and practical necessity, which

were largely defined by the Christian ethos Nietzsche intends to destroy. For example,

the Christian and Classical cohabitate in attributes as elemental to the West as its

epistemology and the concept of sin. Nietzsche directs the reader to rarely questioned

certainties and lends them philosophical significance:iii14 among them, the law of causes

and effects, by which humans assign relationships between agents and subjects in simple

dualities,15 and the belief that truth is attainable through logic and sense perception.16 Sin

is more than a standard against which “right” and “wrong” are measured; it is one of

religion’s sources of control over the Western mind. Nietzsche considers it a diversion

from ancient Greek conceptions of right-action.17 He explains, sin “would strike a Greek

as ridiculous and annoying.”18

iii
“…That there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances,
bodies…”
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As Nietzsche’s compares modern epistemology and the concept of sin to their

Greek ancestors, a contrast emerges which is roughly reflected in the Classical tradition

by associations with Apollo and Dionysus, respectively. Whereas the Renaissance and its

progeny adopted elements of the former (i.e. conceptions of reason, truth-claims, and the

use of sense perception as the basis for knowledge-development) without shedding the

Christian ethos (i.e. humility, faith, salvation), Nietzsche lends support to the latter. The

Dionysian strain of Greek thought indicated by vitality, spirit, and acceptance of the

unknowable, contrasts with the eighteenth century Apollonian ideals of reason and the

search for truth. Dionysian imagery suggests human value and dignity in the absence of

the Enlightenment’s perfectionist ideals; Nietzsche attributes to it logic, as “the

conceptual understandability of existence,” rather than its scientific demonstrability; and

submits pessimism as well as optimism as legitimate philosophical outlooks.19

The project of incorporating a more complete vision of the Classical world into

the sources from which Western culture can draw lessons has roots that extend as least as

early as the Renaissance, iv20 but historical movements bound by Christian convention

stunted its progress. For example, Nietzsche mistakenly believed nineteenth century

Romanticism would emerge as a source of “more audacious courage, and of more

triumphant fullness of life than had characterized the eighteenth century,”21 and more

specifically believed German music “signified a Dionysian power of the German soul,”

which could altogether enrich Europe’s Classical revival with peculiarly Greek virtues

unknown since Antiquity. However, he came to see Romanticism as an “incautious and

papering spiritual diet”22 linked to the binding, damaging qualities of a Christian ethos.

iv
“… Whole generations as well as many individuals have expended so much good will on attempts to
approach and incorporate this world.”
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Given Nietzsche’s condemnation of Christianity as a source of general

unhappiness, God’s death serves critical functions for the purposes of Nietzsche’s broad

philosophical project to make happiness attainable. However, announcing the death of

God is a simple task to perform, and alone it does not indicate the means to happiness in

the absence of Christianity’s palliative effects. Incorporation of the Dionysian strain of

Classicism lends Nietzsche symbols to illustrate his concepts.*23 In addition, the revival

of a historical Dionysian ethos lends his work a legitimizing synchronicity, linking

individuals in the immediate post-God period to the god-creators of early Antiquity in a

way that merely illustrates elements of the happiness ethos: individualism, lust,

naturalness, mystery, creativity, and attunement to conscience.

Reintroduction of Classicism’s Dionysian strain to Western thought suggests

broad consequences. Nietzsche credits the Dionysian strain with the enrichment and

unity of knowledge. He notes that diverse influences were required to develop scientific

thinking (an Apollonian virtue revived by early Classicism), but their isolation from the

West’s broader intellectual tradition limits discovery (a theme of Dionysian imagery). 24

… They are all functions of one organizing force within one human being. And even

now the time seems remote when artistic energies and the practical wisdom of life

will join with scientific thinking to form a higher organic system in relation to which

scholars, physicians, artists, and legislators – as we know them at present – would

have to look like paltry relics of ancient times.25

*
§370. The following passage is rich with relevant imagery: “He that is richest in the fullness of life, the
Dionysian god and man, cannot only afford the sight of the terrible and questionable but even …
destruction, decomposition, and negation. In his case, what is evil, absurd, and ugly seems, as it were,
permissible, owing to an excess of procreating, fertilizing energies that can still turn any desert into lush
farmland.”
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The event suggested to affect change is expressed in references to rebirth, and restored

health after periods of sickness. 26 Just as happiness is equated with health and

Christianity with infirmity, Europe’s emergence from a half-conceived Classical revival

guided by Christian values is followed by a return to health, or a second Renaissance.

Whereas God’s death clears the land for Nietzsche to construct a new ethos of happiness,

the Classical Greek appeal Dionysian tradition provides the building materials.
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1
§108
2
§108
3
Preface to the Second Edition, p. 38
4
Preface to the Second Edition, p. 35
5
§337
6
§338
7
§326
8
§253
9
§253
10
§305
11
§290
12
§290
13
§338
14
§110
15
§112
16
§111
17
§135
18
§135
19
§370
20
§135
21
§370
22
Preface to the Second Edition, p. 33
23
§370

24
§113
25
§113
26
Preface to the Second Edition, p. 37