چکیده:
This essay focuses on Nietzsche’s unique reading of the Pandora myth as it appears in Human, All Too Human and develops an interpretation of Hope, the most profound evil of the many evils released by Pandora infecting the human condition, as it might be understood in relation to Nietzsche’s analysis of the ancient Greeks in The Birth of Tragedy. In reading this early work of Nietzsche, modes of comportment that fall under two specific categories are considered: Passive Nihilism-Pessimism of Decline and Active Nihilism-Pessimism of Strength as understood by Nietzsche in the late compilation of his notes published as The Will to Power. Ultimately, this essay explores the artistic responses to the bleak and pessimistic conditions of the Greeks’ lives found in the Apolline art in the Homeric Greeks and the tragic-art of the Greeks, which Nietzsche argues, is the ultimate expression of art as the merging of the “aesthetic” principles of the Apolline and Dionysiac. These aesthetic responses are elucidated in and through the comparison to modes of existence that impede the spirit’s optimal, flourishing development, specifically, as expressed through Christianity and “Socratic optimism” in the superior power of human reason
خلاصه ماشینی:
Key words: the Pandora myth, Hope, Pessimism, Nietzsche I In Works and Days Hesiod introduces the now-familiar story of Pandora and the jar () full of evils and in doing so establishes a view of the human condition - a non-systematic metaphysics and ontology - that is bleak, depressive, and consistent with a pessimistic view in which all things bend toward destruction and all humans are continually and relentlessly exposed to senseless, profuse, and unending instances of suffering.
Nietzsche identifies (1) “those who suffer from an overfullness of life – they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life, a tragic insight” into the general and insurmountable questionable nature of the universe (Pessimism of Strength/Active Nihilism) and (2) “those who suffer from the impoverishment of life and seek rest, stillness, calm seas, redemption from their lives through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anaesthesia, and madness [Pessimism as Decline/Passive Nihilism],” namely, through forms of escapism, modes of self-narcotization, to which we link Hope later in the analysis when exploring the responses to nihilism found in Christianity and the philosophy of Socrates (Nietzsche 1974, 328).
We now explore two ways in which Hope manifests in its nefarious and malevolent form, both of which Nietzsche is exceedingly critical: Christianity and “Socratic optimism” in the superior power of human reason, and we relate these to our forthcoming discussion of art in The Birth of Tragedy.