The Birth Of Tragedy And Early Nietzsche’s Philosophy Of Life

Nietzsche’s thought has always been a topic of great concern in the academic community.The current research in the academic community indicates that a thorough study of Nietzsche’s early philosophical thoughts is beneficial for a deeper understanding of the overall intention and mechanism of Nietzsche’s philosophical thought.At the same time,as Nietzsche’s early thought deeply reflects the basic problems and difficulties of Western modern thought,deep research on this topic is also beneficial for people to deeply understand Western modern thought.Nietzsche’s early works mainly include published works such as The Birth of Tragedy,Untimely Meditations,and related unpublished manuscripts.The Birth of Tragedy is Nietzsche’s first publicly published work,which contains the basic intention and viewpoints of Nietzsche’s early thought.Nietzsche regarded The Birth of Tragedy as a philosophical work rather than a classical one,and the basic intention of this work is to view art and science from the perspective of life.In The Birth of Tragedy,Nietzsche regards the question of life,that is,the question of the meaning of existence,as the basic question of philosophy.In Nietzsche’s view,Greek tragedy contains a fundamental insight about the meaning of existence.According to this insight,individual life is meaningless in itself,and people must return to the original unity of the whole world to overcome this nihilism situation,and this original unity is fundamentally an artistic and aesthetic reshaping of the world.Nietzsche called this artistic reshaping of the world"artist metaphysics".In Nietzsche’s eyes,the scientism tradition initiated by Socrates destroyed the metaphysics of art in Greek tragedy.The metaphysics of art elaborated by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy constitutes the core of early Nietzsche’s thought,and the theoretical nature of this core is romanticism.To understand early Nietzsche’s romanticist philosophy of life and art,it is necessary to analyse Nietzsche’s criticism of modern philosophy.Nietzsche believes that as modern philosophy increasingly understands the world from a mechanistic perspective,the meaning of the world and the meaning of human existence are also increasingly threatened.The mechanistic view of nature will theoretically lead to nihilism,which is the main challenge Nietzsche faces when thinking about the meaning of life.This situation is labeled by Nietzsche as "fatal truth".It is precisely the fundamental contradiction between truth and life that prompted early Nietzsche to choose the romanticist metaphysics of art.During this period,Nietzsche could see that the romanticist metaphysics of art was fundamentally a culture rather than a description of the real world.However,Nietzsche believed that only this culture could resist the moral decadence of modern society.In The Birth of Tragedy and other early works,Nietzsche repeatedly mentioned that the Socratic tradition of scientism and modern mechanistic worldview are intensifying the utilitarianism and philistinism tendencies of civil society.In the face of this situation,Nietzsche believes that we must use a cultural creation to improve people’s spiritual quality again.Nietzsche’s early romanticism originated from his critical reflection on Western tradition,modern philosophy,and contemporary civil society.Based on this,Nietzsche proposed a romanticist philosophical plan to address the ideological difficulties of the times.However,Nietzsche gradually felt that this romanticist philosophy was fundamentally a negation of the world,rather than an affirmation of the world,which became the key to Nietzsche’s transition from early thought to the philosophy of the will to power.In spite of this,Nietzsche’s philosophy in the middle and later period still continues the basic intention of Nietzsche’s early thought:to think about how to establish the meaning of life in the situation of nihilism of western thought.