“[O]nly man is a grave burden for himself! […] Especially the strong, reverent spirit that would bear much: he loads too many alien grave words and values on himself, and then life seems a desert to him.”
Friedrich Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the tribulations of the modern man is neatly contained within the image of Shakespeare’s protagonist in the 1603 tragic drama, Hamlet. Nietzsche, writing in his first book-length publication, The Birth of Tragedy, released in 1872, pens the significance of Hamlet as among the first literary phenomena to gather both the ontological truth, and the cultural sickness of modernity. Recognising the character’s faults and limitations, Nietzsche holds Hamlet in high esteem, and identifies strongly with the character’s internal chaos and disorder.
Nietzsche provides explicit writing on Hamlet in The Birth of Tragedy, though I’ll extrapolate where necessary to connect other relevant works of Nietzsche to evaluate Hamlet. The Birth of Tragedy, as we are aware, is regarded as the worst book of Nietzsche’s and is hardly canon. Nietzsche himself would later dismiss the work for its inconsistency, overly-verbose writing style, image-confused manner and lack of intellectual rigour that his readers expect. This considered, the work is only bad in a relative sense. It’s still a remarkable philological text on Greek tragedy and culture and one providing great insight. Let’s begin.
Nietzsche’s significance as a pre-postmodern, pre-existentialist philosopher, lies in his identification of nihilism in the moral and cultural currents coursing through modern Europe. Nietzsche’s best insight is not in his metaphysics or ontology, but in looking at the fixations, the goals and the values of European cultures and people. He finds in looking here that most all moral paradigms in the post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment, modern European setting, fester in the ruin of sick philosophical, cultural and religious virtues. He is the first to locate nihilism, seeing it even among the greatest thinkers — Kant, Schopenhauer, Socrates, Wagner — and those who, in reality, are repackaging Christianity into new forms.
Existentialism is invoked as Nietzsche’s child, and as I understand, he emerges as the first true atheistic existentialist. Strictly speaking, Nietzsche predated the 20th century existentialist movement and offers points of distinction from explicit existentialist thought as we know today, though without Nietzsche, existentialism would not have been possible. Nietzsche is the first to confer to the landscape of human possibility; the capacity of choice and, as a result, decision-making divorced from traditional values and institutions. Key to this equation, he provides the necessary philosophical and cultural environment — completely disconnected from the shackles of theology — for the supremacy of the individual to come forth. I argue Kierkegaard, an earlier existentialist, did not establish the same external conditions for the individual as Nietzsche did, and thus Nietzsche is more important to the development of Existentialist thought. Camus’ absurdism — as the absence of authoritative truth — was prefigured by Nietzsche as the message-bearer proclaiming God’s death. It was not only God’s death Nietzsche identified, but he questioned the foundation of all truth sources.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche characterises Hamlet as the first literary figure to be seized by the sheer scope of human possibility — and yet every decision he reconciles, as utterly devoid of meaning as the other. This possibility is the existential dread scrutinised by later French existentialists — the chasm betweening understanding and action. All moral imperatives are false without the believability of the north star in God and our epistemic faculties fall well short of allowing us to acquire absolute truth. Nietzsche, practically speaking, held true to this relativism through his career. He never submitted to an authoritative, ahistorical matrix or system.
The pit of despair, or the lack of absolute truth, as Nietzsche finds in The Birth of Tragedy depicts the true essence of life. Life is suffering and humans despair, which is a capitulation to Arthur Schopenhauer’s Will. Nietzsche was still married, and not yet separated from the Schopenhauerian Will in The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche sees the world, here, as ontologically rooted in the ‘primordial unity’ as he calls it, or basically what is the Schopenhauerian Will, the irrational force at the bottom of everything. This is the painful reality of the true world, this primordial unity, connected to the Dionysian chaos, meaning everything at its essence — a meaningless pit of suffering and undividedness. Quite pessimistic, right?
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche views Hamlet, as the reflection of himself, one who has suffered the same fate, to have gazed upon the horrible thought of Dionysian chaos. Like Nietzsche, Hamlet has seen Dionysus completely discharged of the Apollonian lies, he’s realised the pit of subjectivity and viewed the impossibility of all decisions. “I was the first’, Nietzsche divulged later in Ecce Homo, ‘to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies.”
The subjectivity Hamlet is dissolved into and his new conception of self he’s forced to confront, is the realisation that, in Sartre’s words “existence precedes essence”, that we are too closely linked with the primordial unity, we are the primordial unity. That unity, at the root of all things, including ourselves, lacks any definition or essence.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche has an answer to this tragedy in the form of Apollo. The one who emerges as the individuator, and the one who provides us, in the form of the plastic and visual arts, an opportunity to temporarily but with enough force, evade reality using aesthetic phenomena.
This is the thesis of the The Birth of Tragedy, the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy. With Apollo, we begin to differentiate ourselves from our environment, see the chair as an object in the corner of the room, separate from the table, see you as yourself and the tree as another external object, but Nietzsche argues, Apollo does not shut us off from the primordial reality altogether, writing, Apollo enables recognition that “beneath the flux of phenomena [,] eternal life flow[ing] indestructibly”. With Apollo, we can peak upon Dionysus and bring order to chaos.
The Greeks, for a period, found the correct dosage of Apollo in daily life. Not too much, not to little. Apollo, by giving us sculpture and painting, or in a play — the character, plot, setting and structure, permits enough myth to carry on, for the knowledge of the tragic primordial unity “kills action; action [, thus] requires the veils of illusion.” Without Apollo, we simply stagnate and are consumed by “the echo of innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe in the ‘wide space of the world night,’”, our energy is too quickly dispensed. Using the analogy of theatre, imagine witnessing a play high on Dionysian drunken ecstasy — there is too much song, the chorus is dominating, there is no plot, no continuity in characters and the whole spectacle is a waste of time.
This gives rise to The Birth of Tragedy’s most popular quote:
“In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no — true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.”
Nietzsche would later drop the ‘primordial unity’ as a theory of his work at his departure from Schopenhauer, and instead reorient his studies to the evaluation of morality and values. Nietzsche thus no longer saw the world as inherently rooted in suffering and tragedy, but rather viewed suffering as an intrinsic aspect of human existence. Not to dispel suffering, but rather glorify its transformative power in striving for something greater and above oneself.
Nietzsche’s philosophy soon matured. He recognised to intensely emphasise ontology and the substance of reality was squandering time. It is thus, more important to focus on the appraisal of our value systems and whether these give rise to something greater, or something smaller. Nietzsche’s discussion of Hamlet is thus most productive where we focus our attention on Hamlet’s inertia in the modern European cultural malaise.
Hamlet, like Nietzsche, is untimely. He has lost faith in the traditional value framework and turns to chaos and disruption in grasping at something new and fresh that will make his heart sing.
Hamlet has all the problems of the modern man, but Nietzsche sees him as one making strides to swim against the stream of European consciousness.
