Nietzsche on Tragedy: First and Last Thoughts

Abstract There is an optimistic narrative in the secondary literature according to which Nietzsche started out as a Schopenhauerian metaphysician of some kind before leaving Schopenhauer behind him, and, by the end of his sane life, metaphysics too. His opening and closing remarks about tragedy, however, sit uneasily with this narrative. The late remarks are simply too similar to the early ones for the story to accommodate them—not for their Schopenhauerianism but for the strongly metaphysical flavour that they appear to share. The argument of this essay is that the appearance is veridical and that attempts to explain away the metaphysical flavour of the later remarks cannot succeed. The essay concludes with a brief diagnosis of why Nietzsche’s final reflections on tragedy, in Twilight of the Idols, so unignorably (and in my view regrettably) recall the ones expressed in his first book.