Ennobling humanity: Nietzsche and the politics of tragedy

Abstract

This article offers a critical engagement with Friedrich Nietzsche’s discourse on tragedy and explores its main political implications. The study first examines the ways in which the pessimistic interpretation of the world that the young Nietzsche derives from his study of Greek tragedy leads him to adopt a distinctive attitude towards politics that he later designates as a form of ‘realism’. We then consider how this discourse develops in his mature writings, and flesh out its normative fabric through a reconstruction of Nietzsche’s critique of Europe’s political culture of raison d’état. Through this layered exegesis, we gain a better appreciation of the politics of this important episode of intellectual history, as well as timely insights into the troubled relationship between security, secularisation and political agency under conditions of late modernity. The concluding analysis highlights the originality and continued relevance of Nietzsche’s tragic pathos as a vehicle for critical reflection and political education in the context of recent debates on tragedy in international political theory.