A Comparative Study of Zhuangzi and Nietzsche’s Tragic Vision and Aestheticism

Abstract This article argues that both Zhuangzi and Nietzsche’s aestheticism is a means of overcoming their tragic vision of life. Nietzsche’s aesthetic state of Dionysian intoxication and Zhuangzi’s floating/wandering (游) involve similar, rapturous self-loss in merging with a primal unity or ground being of existence. Both seek an aestheticised, spiritual freedom that is built on an alienation from their perceived reality. Both versions of aestheticism have their price: the penalty of Zagreus in Dionysus, and the sacrifice of historical time and historical self in Zhuangzi’s thought. Beneath their aestheticised vision of primal unity, both are torn by tragic conflicts and sacrifice. Of Zhuangzi, we could say the same as Nietzsche said of the Greeks in his The Birth of Tragedy: ‘this is the real meaning of the famous Greek serenity, so often misrepresented as some kind of untroubled cheerfulness’.