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The Birth of Tragedy

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"The Birth of Tragedy" (1872) was Nietzsche's first published work, and what a work it is. Taking as its point of departure the origins and eventual death of tragedy in ancient Greece, this book shouldn't be taken as a literal meditation on Greek tragedy. Instead, Nietzsche uses his discussion of this art form to analyse trends he saw in the Germany of the early-1870s and to examine the similarities between the Hellenic world and the world of Bismarckian Germany.

He begins with an explanation of the dual Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies in art. The Apollonian, based on illusion, form, and restrained aesthetic contemplation, is contrasted with the Dionysian, which is characterized by a visceral, ecstatic, transcendental state. To Nietzsche, Greek tragedy was the only art form which was able to merge these two conflicting aesthetics into a successful union. He likens the operas of his then-hero, Richard Wagner, to the tragic drama of ancient Greece, and suggests that this similarity should be a cause of hope for the renewal of the "German spirit."

Crazy? Of course. Nietzsche was not a man noted for his intellectual restraint, and his associative thinking is never wilder or more disputable than in "The Birth of Tragedy." It is this very wildness which would later lead the philosopher to all but disown this book.

But "The Birth of Tragedy" is more than far-fetched theorizing--it is also a penetrating gaze into the destructive side of pure reason and the sunny optimism of the Enlightenment, which Nietzsche posits as being embodied in ancient Greece in the form of Socrates, whose withering, anti-aesthetic thinking Nietzsche finds deadening and repugnant. In the hyper-rational, heavily bureaucratic world in which he found himself at the dawn of the 1870s, Nietzsche looked to the colossal operas of Wagner to find a counterbalance to the icy skepticism of Socrates (and the Enlightenment) and what he considered to be a fundamental misunderstanding of ancient Greek culture on the part of his contemporaries. In stark contrast to their appraisal of Greek culture as serene and harmonious, Nietzsche located the enduring greatness of the Hellenic world in its brave and fierce pessimism, which he saw best represented in tragedy.

"The Birth of Tragedy," then, is a cry of hope from its author for what he considered a renewal of German myth and unity. It does not make for easy reading, however, and the reader should be prepared for many, many pages of exhausting and often ludicrous "insights," not one of which makes much sense from a logical point of view, but all of which play a vital role in Nietzsche's brilliant and brilliantly original analyses of ancient and modern culture.

Nietzsche's writing style when viewed, as art is itself a remarkable example, par excellence, of the very topic he discusses-in The Birth of Tragedy-put into practice. It is ubiquitously bursting forth with such abundance (Dionysian)-yet streamlined by the infinite depth of his perceptions (Socratic)-that he illuminates the art of the entire Greek Civilization with elegant simplicity, compassion, and courage (Apollonian).

Nietzsche was one of the first to analyze Greek art in terms of its psychological ramifications-both conscious and unconscious. He posits that the two driving forces for art-whether it was painting, sculpture, music, or tragedy- required a mixture of the gods, Dionysus (Pan) and Apollo, whose virtues were synonymous with nature, but nearly bipolar. Apollo, the Delphic god, requires self-knowledge and demands that his disciples exorcize prudence in action; however, Dionysus demands complete abandon and excess. One cannot exist without the other: Apollo, though despising all misery and barbaric acts, knew that his existence depended upon that of Dionysus.

According to Nietzsche, Art stems directly from nature; it is not an imitation or reflection; therefore, the artist must commune with the gods and nature in order to render any art as such. The artist desires art to be 'the unvarnished expression of the truth' of the world; hence, Art is eternal universal truth. Art should achieve a fusion between the subjective and objective, hence, the artistic creation is 'like the weird image of the fairy tale which can turn its eyes at will and behold itself'.

Dionysus is the primordial artistic power that conjures the entire universe into being. It is a communal or collective consciousness, which exists in every individual just as every individual, exists in Dionysus. There is a complete absence of duality between individual and collective consciousness, hence, the individual transcends the limits of existence and becomes one with the collective mind who speaks with one voice-Art. Dionysus reveals the true nature of life as 'bliss born of pain'. Nature communicates its wisdom through the agency of pathos; it wishes to share its suffering and some of the truths in the world.

The paragon of Greek art is the tragedy. Tragedy takes place where Apollo and Dionysus have entwined perfectly forming a hybrid braid. The Dionysian Satyr is the incarnation of tragedy and exists within the realm of the gods as myth and cult. Tragedy transforms one into a Satyr. It is sudden and powerful: the Satyr dominated the "man of culture", 'like lamplight is nullified by the light of day'. This caused the tragedy to lead one back to the primal core of nature where one may stare boldly, directly into the destructiveness and cruelty of nature, which imbues one with such profound insight into the horrendous truth, that one is smitten listless with the absurdity of all worldly existence. True knowledge negates existence and the will to act-one asks, what good would it do to remedy a world, which abounds with such profound injustice-a world so askew. Then when the will is nearly irretrievably lost to the void-and a second seems to span all of eternity-art snatches us from the precipice of oblivion. The brilliance of Apollo, like a clarion call, comes shining through as art and redeems all life. Art propitiates the horrible and the comic relieves absurdity. Art soothes us with a healing immersion so sublime and tranquil that we experience life as overwhelmingly invincible and pleasurable in the face of all adversity-i.e., rapture. Through this rapture, one garners the true laurels of life and continues onward as a glorious saga that rivals that of Odysseus. This is how the Greeks experienced tragedy: it was the fount of life sustaining energy, which endowed them with a great sensitivity for the Arts. Therefore, Tragedy is a rite of passage from Man to Satyr to God (hero who is cheerful in adversity); then the vision is complete.

According to Nietzsche-although the Germans have succumbed to "Socratic Optimism" and predominantly guided by concepts-there are still some vestiges of the true German spirit, which lies deep within an abyss dreaming in glorious 'Dionysian strength, like a knight sunk in slumber'. This is the myth of Sigfried used in Wagner's Ring. However, this also elicits the myth of Endymion whose immortality-granted by the gods-reaches a state of final atonement by spending all of eternity sleeping. Perhaps, Nietzsche is being more critical of the Germans than he appears to be.

Socrates, speaking as a Philosopher, proposed that the mind perceives the truth of the world, but the body is an encumbrance acting as fetters to the mind and higher pursuits (See The Last Days of Socrates by Plato). Therefore, Socrates freed his mind (a priori) to discern the true nature of reality from mere appearance; thus, he became the first theoretical man. Everything that exists satisfies him; he never suffers from pessimism-upon uncovering the truth, there are still more layers of undiscovered wisdom, which saves him so "through his own efforts" he succeeds. Socratic philosophy instills an insatiable hunger for knowledge in its disciples-exploring and fathoming nature ad infinitum becomes an end in itself-Science becomes Art. Socrates' influence upon the neophyte, Plato, was quite profound; hence, the entire world has adopted causality as the one true god. The individual is enshrined within a realm of solvable problems from which predictability becomes the god. There is rapture with scientific discovery and inquiry. There is a transition from man to mind, however, the mind must transcend the body in order to commune with nature and divine the truths of the world, which are highly abstract. When truth is uncovered, one experiences rapture (i.e., a gift from Apollo) and becomes a god.

Who is the wisest man of all-it is Nietzsche.

The ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche has had considerable influence on much of twentieth century philosophy and other areas as well. Indeed, the modern dance technique of Doris Humphrey is one of the many, and was taken to be based on his distinction between the Apollinian and Dionysian duality. Walter Kaufmann, the translator and commentator of this book, has given the reader a distinct view of Nietzsche in two of his works, the "Birth of Tragedy" being his first, and one of his last, "The Case of Wagner".

Nietzsche was one of the few philosophers who engaged in self-criticism, and is the most honest of all philosophers who took to the pen. This is indeed manifest in his "Attempt at a Self-Criticism", which was added to the 1886 edition of "The Birth of Tragedy". Nietzsche attempted to view the nature of truth without any masks, and his need to do this resulted in his works perhaps being more of a dialog with himself than with his readers. With every line written, Nietzsche was making sure that he himself was convinced of what was put down on paper. But this must at all times be done without "arresting the play" and negating the "terrors of existence".

Kaufmann represents "The Birth of Tragedy" as a work that allowed Nietzsche to justify his appointment to a full chair of philology at the young age of 25, but also a book that would not appeal to anyone in German academic circles. It would appear that Nietzsche was determined to remain independent, and not become intoxicated with the "prestige" of being appointed to such a position at such an early age. Nietzsche's later criticism of his own work would seem to justify this interpretation. This total intellectual honesty of Nietzsche is unique in the history of philosophy.

What is most valuable about "The Birth of Tragedy" is its restatement of Greek life and culture, which up to Nietzsche's time was conceived in terms of the "Winckelmann view" according to Kaufmann. The "noble simplicity, calm grandeur" of Goethe and the "sweetness and light" of Matthew Arnold were the appropriate adjectives for Greek culture. But Nietzsche brought in the Dionysian festivals, as another aspect of it, and its longing, in the words of Kaufmann, to "exceed all norms". This insight of Nietzsche has wide-ranging applications, for it points to the need of all cultures, and thus all individuals, to at times attend the Dionysian festival and get out of equilibrium, remain for awhile off-balance, and get intoxicated with the dance of unreason.

But with intellectual honesty towards oneself comes the same for others, and Nietzsche did not hesitate to depart with friends when there was conflict with this honesty. Thus Nietzsche wrote "The Case of Wagner", a very damning indictment against his former friend Richard Wagner, and a book which Nietzsche subtitled "A Musician's Problem". Nietzsche describes his reasons for writing at it as a consequence of a "special self-discipline: to take sides against everything sick in me". This included Wagner, Schopenhauer, and all of what Nietzsche called "modern humaneness". According to Nietzsche, Wagner was just one of his sicknesses. But sickness can be a stimulant to life, he says, but only if one is healthy enough for this stimulant.

So what about Wagner bothered Nietzsche? It was the fact in Nietzsche's view, Wagner's music was nongenuine. Wagner was an "actor in music", according to Nietzsche, and a lack of honesty or genuineness was intolerable to Nietzsche. The integrity and "authenticity" of musicians has never been put to the test so dangerously, he says. Wagner's music is a sign of a declining culture, and in such a culture, believed Nietzsche, authenticity becomes superfluous and a liability. Thus the passion that Wagner's music instilled in people, and the boredom it alleviated in orchestra musicians, was more of a sign of decadence, rather than achievement. It was an attempt to "arrest the flow", to negate the original "difficulty of life", and this, in Nietzsche's view, was its essential crime, a crime that Christianity and other forms of decadence also committed. The ninth part of the book ends with the following lines which make Nietzsche's Wagnerian complaint particularly manifest: "That the theatre should not lord it over the arts. That the actor should not seduce those who are authentic. That music should not become an art of lying. "

Typical paperback, but an odd book from Nietzsche. Very florid writing, a light, vaguely-interesting historical interpretation of the 'fall' of Western art. Meh.

The Birth of Tragedy (Out of the Spirit of Music) was Nietzsche's first book, published in 1872 when he was 27 years old. In it he discusses Greek tragedy and the world more generally in terms of three tendencies: the Dionysian, the Apollonian and the Socratic.

Of the Dionysian he writes: "Greek tragedy in its earliest form had for its sole theme the sufferings of Dionysus, and for a long time the only stage hero was Dionysus himself... All the celebrated figures of the Greek stage - Prometheus, Oedipus, etc - are mere masks of the original hero, Dionysus..."

Of the Apollonian he writes: "The joyous necessity of the dream experience has been embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo: Apollo the god of all plastic energies... the "shining one," the deity of light, is also the ruler over the beautiful illusion of the inner world of fantasy. The higher truth, the perception of these states in contrast to the incompletely intelligible everyday world, this deep consciousness of nature, healing and helping in sleep and dreams, is at the same time the symbolical analogue of the soothsaying faculty and of the arts generally, which make life possible and worth living."

Nietzsche believes that the body is an overwhelmingly unconscious, non-individuated and active force, "Dionysian", in a constant process of Becoming.

The Apollonian is the healthy force of the mind that re-acts to the body and to the world, rendering them consciously intelligible and individuated, through art, archetypes and narratives we tell ourselves while we are awake, and through the healing power of dreams while we sleep (cf. The Twenty-Four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives by Rosalind D. Cartwright).

What the Apollonian re-presents is not necessarily "true" in the sense of "correspondence" with the "real" world, but rather "affirmative" in the sense that it is a healthy re-presentation in the service of Life.

Nietzsche contrasts the Dionysian (healthy, unconscious active forces) and the Apollonian (healthy, conscious reactive forces) with the Socratic:

"Consider the consequences of the Socratic maxims: Virtue is knowledge; man sins only from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy... Now the virtuous hero must be a dialectician, now there must be a necessary, visible connection between virtue and knowledge, faith and morality."

For the Socratic (unhealthy, conscious reactive forces), all re-presentations should be in the service of Knowledge, placing rational argumentation and Science above Art (thus killing Greek tragedy).

But ultimately Science itself is not in "correspondence" with real world "facts" (or Plato's Forms), but is rather in "coherence" with a dominant scientific interpretation or "paradigm" (cf. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). For Nietzsche, "There are no facts, only interpretations".

What is worst about the Socratic, according to Nietzsche, is that it places the re-presentations of Science in judgment of and opposition to Life, which often requires beautiful illusions in order to flourish.

Commenting on The Birth of Tragedy in a preface he wrote 16 years later, Nietzsche refers to "the task which this audacious book dared to tackle for the first time: to look at science in the perspective of the artist, but at art in that of Life."

"The Birth of Tragedy Out Of The Spirit Of Music" is Nietzsche in the raw. This is before the later, "mature" posturing armchair philosopher took over. This is the philologist unearthing a great treasure - the Ancient Greeks REALLY lived, and in their super-abundance of LIFE, they had room for Tragedy/Pessimism! The opposite then, is also true, our modern society that cries out for OPTIMISM and "positive-thinking" is therefore the clearest sign that we are less than alive. This book is Nietzsche seeing in ART, that blazing passion for being ALIVE. This is Nietzsche as the young, unsystematic YEA-SAYER to LIFE. Aesthetics as the true metaphysics - not morality, since LIFE is beyond temporal, earthly taboos. ART-LIFE as the representation of transcending good and evil (later formulated more fully in "Beyond Good And Evil". This is art seen under the lens of life.

Forget Wagner, whose disgruntled cacophony posing as music is nicely dispatched by Oscar Wilde in one of his plays with a comparative quip when somebody rings an old and disturbingly noisy doorbell. Forget Wagner because The Birth of Tragedy is the greatest work of art criticism ever written. It is also, despite being in print for a century, an underexplored gold mine for artists and intellectuals. This is Nietzsche's first book: it contains en ovo the thoughts of this great writer and thinker who had a formative influence on Heidegger and through him Derrida, the two greatest post-Nietzschean philosophers. Nietzsche's great theme is the infinite possibility opened up by Greek culture in 6th century B.C., in the time of Heraclitus and the birth of tragedy-the culture that spawned not only democracy and science but which, like a brood of many eggs only some of which have hatched (or quantum possibility before measurement "collapses" the wave function into reality)-much more besides--the culture beside whose tragedic productions (by Aeschylus and Sophocles, not Euripedes, whom Nietzsche shows lost touch with the essence of tragedy) modern cultural productions not only do not measure up, but often seem at best, as Nietzsche says, like a "caricature." The loss of art traced by Nietzsche is itself-well, not tragic, no-less than tragic: sad let us say. Not only a highly creative artist-like philosopher, but a multilingual philologist who read ancient Greek in the original, Nietzsche beams his laser-like analysis with astounding clarity into this lost realm of possibility. It is as if he stuck a bookmark into the Tome of Time, showing us the very best part of an otherwise often dry and rather bad (and perhaps overly long!) book of which we collectively are the author, called Culture. What is crucial to emphasize in B of T is Nietzsche's conclusion (or assumption) that (in its most famous line) "existence is only justified as an aesthetic phenomenon." Thus ancient Greek tragedy is not just a random subject, or one art form among others. It is the aesthetic experience par excellence, the greatest overcoming of the perils of existence into a worthy production of art humans ever developed. Nietzsche links the success of Aeschylean and Sophoclean tragedy to the brief fruitful intercourse (like that between men and women, which keeps new people coming despite often-fractious sexual relationships) between two aesthetic strains. One he identifies with the Greek messenger god of the sun, Apollo, the other with the dismembered god of wine, Dionysos. Dionysos also is not one god among others. Rather, it was to him that all the (originally religious) tragedies were devoted and, Nietzsche tells us, when other actors appeared on the sacred precursor to the Greek stage they were not to be taken as realistic but as avatars, idealized other versions, of Dionysos. Now the most crucial thing to realize about Dionysos is that "he" is split into pieces and his split pieces represent the fundamental, and contradictory, fact of the universe: that although all is one (to borrow a philosophical truism) this One is split into many. This primordial splitting (cf. Heidegger's distinction between individual beings and Being) is, according to Nietzsche, regarded by the ancient Greeks as itself the ur-source of human suffering. From Dionysos's tears came mankind, from his smile the gods. Now Nietzsche says that the Apollinian aesthetic strain manifests in the clarity of dreams-which show discrete-although ultimately illusory-images. These images are similar to those that appear before the chorus (crucial to tragedy but dispensed with by Euripedes), and before the spectators, in the form of the actors of the tragic spectacle. Thus the tragical spectacle displayed shows itself to be a dreamlike illusion of the culture, not a representation of reality per se. Just as, after we stare at the sun, we see spots before our eyes so, Nietzsche says, after we stare into the abyss we see the tragedy with its chorus and ideal human characters. The Dionysian element Nietzsche identifies with drunkenness and dissolution, the opposite of the clarity of dream imagery, made public on the Greek stage. The Dionysian in a sense represents the One, or the movement from the individual (seen a la Schopenhauer and Vedic metaphysics as a mayan illusion of universe that "I"s itself) back to the One; the Apollinian the illusory clarity of the skin-encapsulated individual. (Nietzsche's own individuality, and brain, were compromised by Treponema spirochetes, real Dionysian avatars of the syphilis that eventually killed him.) One of the most fascinating things about Nietzsche's exquisitely crafted analysis is the way it shows science, no less than Euripides, to be motivated by Socrates' false humility and dreams of total knowledge. "Who is this demigod?" Nietzsche asks of Socrates-whose reign of reasonableness, passed on to Plato, Aristotle, and the Church scholastics-defines much of the modern world. Socrates created the secular tradition, raising knowledge over aesthetics and giving mysticism a bad name. Nietzsche points out that Plato burnt his plays after coming into contact with his teacher-and that the compromise, the Platonic dialogues, were in fact the prototype of a new, Socratized art form-the novel. Thus, startlingly Nietzsche suggests the novel itself is a debased form of art-a Euripideanized, Socratized attempt to make the primal aesthetic experience more representative, reasonable, and realistic. Euripedes (he later recanted, but his influence went on) dispensed with the tragic core of stagecraft, and today we accept that drama is about individual characters in all their oddity and imperfections-rammed at us unremittingly with the hegemony of plot and wordy deus ex machina explanations in the aesthetically poisonous, hyperrationalistic aftermath of Euripides's Socratic capitulations. In sum, today we have all but forgotten the Dionysian origins of acting-more real than realism-which originally was centered around not fleeting emotions and empathy, but the central cosmological fact of the individuals tragic separation from the All. Highly recommended.

It's helpful to get a sense of the context in which Nietzsche wrote this subversive treatise against Science as Truth which would establish the directional pattern of his later writing and mushroom into a towering influence on the thinking of the century following it.

Nietzsche was writing in Germany at a time when Hegel's dialectical account of History which is supposed to consumate itself in Absolute Knowledge, a utopian culture of ('big S') Science and an eternally modern present was sweeping through the intellectual ether. As has been summarized much before, the dialectical motion of Plato's Socratic reasoning, which Hegel adapts to the History of Mankind, moves from thesis (an idea about the way things are) to anti-thesis (it's contradiction and negation, or disatisfaction with that idea) to a synthesis (a new idea about how to do things which advances by and with preserving the knowledge of both prior ideas). Repeat for two millenia and Hegel says you get Absolute Knowledge of the human condition and the possibility of utopia. Nietzsche begs to differ.

He thinks this situation leads to nihilism. Man (or at least the philosophical type) has engorged himself with an insatiable lust for knowledge and is now dying from overfullness, being fat as a pig. Nietzsche's analysis also reflects disatisfaction on the 'folk' side of this equation with pessimism about a 'modern' culture which has no purpose other than consumption. A culture with no sense of art, no ability to see beauty in the tragic and human finitude, and wants only more Science to help make itself fatter.

This 'harmony' of enlightened consumer culture Nietzsche feels is the result of the triumph of (what he calls in "The Birth of Tragedy") "Socratic" man, the utilitarian, scientific man who insists on certainty and posesses imagination. Man as calculating consumer and librarian of the past, all head and stomach, but no heart, spirit or creative imagination for the future.

Nietzsche does not reject the dialectical metaphysics of Plato and Hegel completely. He just rejects the third moment, the synthesis, he thinks we're at our best in the second moment, the strength-inducing moment of antagonism. It is a kind of materialist metaphysics of nostalgia for the time when metaphysics did not have to accept materialism. A nostalgia for a time when man (a metaphysical concept 'him-self') was Appollinian, when he used his reasoning with will as art of transforming the wild and passionate 'mere-appearances' of Dionysian nature or phenomena into products of great imagination. Scientific, Socratic man wants to skip this struggle and enjoy the pleasures of nature entirely from his sofa.

Nietzsche's concept of Man (Dionysian, Appollinian and Socratic) as presented in "The Birth of Tragedy" follows, perhaps even 'corresponds' to a great tradition of 'three-fold' concepts of man throught Western history. The first notable being Plato's idea of man as composed of natural desires, thymos ('spirit' in the sense of pride) and reasoning mind. The most recent being Freud's id, ego and super-ego. Nietzsche stands between Plato and Freud. He rejects Plato's exaltation of the Socratic, mental, reasoning element above all others, but he would also reject Dr. Freud's (himself a 'Socratic' man?) belittling of man's 'irrational heart' and fetishizing of the id.

For Nietzsche, Plato and Freud represent the twin modern evils of mentalism and naturalism, or CALCULATING and CONSUMERISM, both of which team up to reject and belittle the strong poetry of Nietzsche's heart, the idiosyncratic spirit and creative capacity of man which he sees as what is essential to making a life WORTH living. The vision is layed out in The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music.

I read this book years ago and I fell in love with the ideas of Nietzsche. I think every teenage intellectual goes through an existentialist phase, it fits so well with the pubescent and oncoming adulthood experience. His theories opened up my mind in a way I never thought it could. The time for me was one of emense confusion, vacillation and angst. It opened up for me a love of philosophy that has carried through to this day as I prepare to further my education on the subject. It helped guide me creating myself into a better man and for that this book and his philosophy will always have a certain affection. Now I have mixed feelings about some of the things that he has written, but this book is incredible. I am a lover of art and theatre, and as an amatuer playwright this book gave insights that I still find breathtaking. I have always believed that history is not the story of stone hard facts and dates but the spectrum of human thought, philosophy, art, music, notions, inventions and a constant state of progress and change. This book is one large key to that spectrum. I would recommend this to any teenager in a place that I was in or any member of the human race for that matter. If you love theatre and want to engage in it in any fashion, then you really need to read this book.

Certainly one of the most influential books in the Western World, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy is also of great interest to the modern day metaphysician and astrologer. Nietzsche explains the alchemy between the god Apollo and the god Dionysius which can be related to the eternal dialogue in the astrology chart between the male and female polarities. Apollo, the Sun, the Solar God and Dionysius, the mysterious and undone god, well symbolized in the chart by the planet Neptune, approach the truth and the source of wisdom in diametrically opposed but mutually supportive manners. This book is as alive today as it was when it was first published. It is a critical text in learning to understand the dialogue between the right and the left brain from a philosophical and metaphysical perspective.