The Philosophy of Tragedy
“Love, hatred, pain, pleasure, life, death. All are there… This is to be human.” -Kentarō Miura
Mega-Passion & Leidenschaft.
In stoicism, the passions are generally seen as an obstacle to wisdom, but I am much rather invoking the idea of a single mega-passion; a deep longing for the entirety of the world.
In the context of the Late Latin passio, suffering renders an “intense desire”. This connotation is reinforced by the christian Passion of Jesus, with passus sum (from lat. patior) meaning to suffer, bear, endure. To quote the Owlcation-article The Etymology of Passion: “Passion is engaging in an intense desire to the point where you are willing to endure pain, suffering and loss”.
Originally however the word stems from Greek pathos which can be translated not only as “suffering”, but also as “feeling”, or, “emotion”. Here the stoic spirit of ancient Greece shines through; people did not see pain as something to be “endured”, but rather to be experienced purely, without judgement. In stoicism this is called apatheia.
To give another dimension of semantic meaning to our idea of Passion, let’s take a quick look at the German translation of the word, which would be “Leidenschaft”. The German word Leidenschaft is comprised of the word “Leiden” which means “suffering” and the suffix “-schaft”, which (derived from the verb “schaffen”, i.e. “to create”, or, “to form something through accumulation”) can be translated as “creation”. In German, this is a common suffix at the end of substantives that describe a totality or a collectivity; i.e. an aggregate. So the word Leidenschaft could either be translated as “the accumulation of suffering”, “creation through suffering“, or rather, “creation of suffering”, which perfectly fits our philosophical idea of Passion.
Passion is to love the human experience unconditionally. There is no qualitative disparity between “different experiences” as there is only one single experience which is the human experience, i.e. Mega-Passion. This realisation causes the constant mental state of Leidenschaft: a pensive mood of melancholic euphoria.
The Christening of Faith.
According to Arthur Schopenhauer, the state of suffering is the quintessential element of life, and happiness were but the fleeting abscence of said suffering.
“All enjoyment is really only negative, only has the effect of removing a pain, while pain or evil … is the actual positive element” (Schopenhauer)
We shall agree on this theory, however Schopenhauer’s deduction that in life one should therefore seek to reduce the amount of the own suffering to a minimum, is ultimately wrong.
Where Schopenhauer wants to hide from the time-bound character of existence, Nietzsche suggests we embrace “the joy of becoming”. Consequently suffering, being the positive element, must also be the creative element. All that bleeds and breathes has been struggled into existence through suffering; the great creator-God.
“All becoming and growing, all that guarantees the future, postulates pain.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Therefore to suffer is to become. The more you suffer, the closer you come to actualise human potentiality — hypothetical godhood if you will. He who can endure the most suffering is the greatest of all humans.
So we shall not doom our suffering but baptise it in struggle and christen it to faith — faith in the perfection of the world as it is— to love that which is ugly by the same manner as one would love the beautiful.
“Then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly.” (Ecce Homo)
Love without Mercy — The Eater of raw Flesh.
Man’s great enjoyment in the art of tragedy comes from the fact that tragedy depicts the archetype of man himself; the struggling man.
In the English translation of Miura’s grotesque manga “Berserk” (arguably one of the greatest tragedies ever written), the protagonist is continuously referred to by the epithet of “The Struggler”. To reference Nietzsche’s comment on the writings of Dostoevsky: “the things they display are ugly: but that they display them comes from their pleasure in the ugly.”
“To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.” -Fyodor Dostoevsky
Pope Benedict XVI brought up the maxim “Deus caritas est” — “God is love”. But since suffering is the positive element (i.e. the cause), consequently love is but its passive effect. Hence a universal creator-God were not to be named a deus caritatae, but logically deus doloriosae; god of suffering according to his primary role.
If the belief in a certain God sees its focus in faith of love, and that only love were “good”, then this were a very shallow, almost hedonistic philosophy. To believe in God should mean to have faith in suffering, regardless of the possibility of love.
We live in the Gnostics’ conception of hell; the material prison of a malevolent demiurge. Gnosticism, out of all christian currents, provides the best answer to this mind-body dualism: the body (i.e. the material realm) is made for suffering, while the mind (i.e. the metaphysical realm) is to overcome suffering.
An eventual demiurge however is no deus doloriosae since he himself does not possess the prerequisite of an own duality. He is the scape-goat for all “chaos and evil” in order to create a dualist antagonsim towards a benevolent “God of Order” who is then presented as a deus caritatae.
In the light of perspectivism one realises that such a good-evil dualism does not exist in reality, as suffering is innocent in itself, not being its own end but part of a positive causality. This is in part what nondualism seeks to explain.
Our god of suffering causes suffering because it is the necessary “evil” for the creation and love of life. If we are to put a name on this deus doloriosae, then we shall name him Dionysus; whom Walter Otto describes as follows: “the god of the most blessed ecstasy and the most enraptured love, (…) the persecuted god, (…) the suffering and dying god, (…) the divine archetype of all triumphant heroes”, who combines within his rapture, “The fullness of life and the violence of death.” (Dionysus: Myth and Cult).
“The saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems; the will to life…that is what I call Dionysian.” (Twilight of the Idols)
To love the world without mercy; that is true love after the image of Dionysus, the “eater of raw flesh”. The possibility of love prerequires the existance of life, which in turn prerequires struggle through suffering. I propose a dionysian love for the human experience; a turning inward of the logos into the far greater cosmos of our mind; the God within. Since perception is reality, the outer world should not be judged, but experienced only; that means in the fullness of emotion: zeal; grief, sorrow; rage, anger; hope, joy.
To love existance, to literally be IN love, or simply; to be — This is the ultimate experience. I do not preach another inanimate “philosophy of reason”, but a philosophy of life — the philosophy of experience.
The Struggler — God Become Self.
He who has removed all projections towards the chaos of the world, has tamed the wild beast of his unconscious, and turned it into a brimming steed. We have defined this constant state of Passion for the world as Leidenschaft.
You are the protagonist in the tragedy of life — you must be the archetypal hero whose suffering creates the plot of the drama, which you can turn into a comedy at will. There is no hero without a tragic story and the most awe-inspiring character in drama is always the one who takes upon himself the greatest possible amount of suffering.
Christ took upon himself the sins of all of humanity out of pure love for the world. He bore the heaviest cross — like Atlas he carried the world on his shoulders. For loving means to suffer, and he who recognized the infinity of love must also fall in love with suffering. Meanwhile the struggle of man is synonymous with the evolution of man in any conceivable sense.
All must be beautiful and desirable in the eyes of God become Self, if one wishes to inhabit the world of his own making. All is beautiful to him who houses the universe within himself. Praise the deus doloriosae that creates and embraces all, and thus became the true god of love. Be the Struggler that embraces all of the cruelty of the deus doloriosae with gratitude, for the gift of life lies within the infinity of love.
To the disciples of Apollo, the Struggler shall proclaim: “While you contemplate about what you can’t understand, I rejoice with gods and animals alike! I am, a disciple of Dionysus!”.
There’s an ocean of emotions in the thimble of our mind.
