Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy

Paul Raimond Daniels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781844652426
• eBook ISBN: 9781317548096
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Nietzsche's philosophy - at once revolutionary, erudite and deep - reaches into all spheres of the arts. Well into a second century of influence, the profundity of his ideas and the complexity of his writings still determine Nietzsche's power to engage his readers. His first book, "The Birth of Tragedy", presents us with a lively inquiry into the existential meaning of Greek tragedy. We are confronted with the idea that the awful truth of our existence can be revealed through tragic art, whereby our relationship to the world transfigures from pessimistic despair into sublime elation and affirmation. It is a landmark text in his oeuvre and remains an important book both for newcomers to Nietzsche and those wishing to enrich their appreciation of his mature writings. "Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy" provides a clear account of the text and explores the philosophical, literary and historical influences bearing upon it. Each chapter examines part of the text, explaining the ideas presented and assessing relevant scholarly points of interpretation. The book will be an invaluable guide to readers in Philosophy, Literary Studies and Classics coming to "The Birth of Tragedy" for the first time.

ONE

Nietzsche and the influences on The Birth of Tragedy

This beginning is remarkable beyond all measure. I had discovered the only likeness and parallel to my own innermost experience which history possesses – I had therewith become the first to comprehend the wonderful phenomenon of the dionysian.

(EH, 49)

The Birth of Tragedy remains an enigma. As a tract on the history of Greek art it aims to draw out the philosophical motives and consequences of tragedy, and proposes that the tragic culture of the Greeks provides to us an imperative for understanding and interpreting our contemporary world. Yet while this may sound straightforward enough, the book is laden with philosophical difficulties and historical complications: for one, it is a book that censures the theoretical mode of philosophizing while at times also employing a similarly troubled mode; also, where Nietzsche calls for a revaluation of modernity, he simultaneously seems to rely on the metaphysical vocabulary and grammar of his predecessor Schopenhauer; and where scholarly certainty fears to tread, Nietzsche colours his pages with poetical accounts of the ancients, and accords this a seemingly equal weighting to established philological research. The Birth of Tragedy presents us with a Gordian knot of sorts, one that entangles antiquity and modernity, philosophy and art, and the human subject with its cultural horizons.

However, the real difficulty with understanding the text, especially in the context of Nietzsche’s wider oeuvre, is that Nietzsche himself reflected on it with such diverse and conflicting appraisals and over so many years. For instance, some fourteen years after The Birth of Tragedy appeared, Nietzsche commissioned a second, almost entirely unaltered edition of the work, which also included a new preface entitled “An Attempt at Self-Criticism”. Here Nietzsche deems The Birth of Tragedy an “impossible” and “questionable book”, whereas in his later writings (as quoted above) he describes it as a “beginning remarkable beyond all measure”, alongside a number of other praises. This leads us to the plausible conclusion that not only is The Birth of Tragedy a riddle for us to unravel, but also that it was a riddle to its author. In response to this it might be proposed that a dynamic interpretation of the text is more apt: that is, we may understand Nietzsche’s inconsistent estimations of the text as the product of the period when he wrote them. Yet this hermeneutic is limited in its ability to explain how it is that, beyond Nietzsche’s authorship, so many interpretations arise from this single text and the treatment of the themes therein. The Birth of Tragedy is a philosophical chameleon whose true colour is still unseen, and whose purpose and intent may very well lie in this fact. It is an amazing work, bold, vast and ambitious; it overwhelmed its author, who could only write of it with differing feelings of pride, curiosity, caution and embarrassment – but never contempt – suggesting that the book is hardly the tame animal that Nietzsche would at times have us believe. With these considerations in mind we can see that The Birth of Tragedy is a book that is alive for us in a quite unusual way, as it continues to offer us the chance to read Nietzsche anew and reassess the grounds for his later philosophy.

The Birth of Tragedy remained important for Nietzsche owing to the themes its philosophical landscape comprises, and the way these themes are entangled and play into one another enable us to appreciate the complexities and philosophical fundamentality of work. As with a landscape, these themes are best grasped first from a distance, which calls for a consideration of the text itself in overview: what is it in The Birth of Tragedy that led Nietzsche to deem it a beginning “remarkable beyond all measure”? What is the importance behind his lifelong fascination with the Greeks, with tragedy, the Dionysiac, and the philosophical conflicts between modern culture and the Presocratics? What is The Birth of Tragedy about?

The Birth of Tragedy: an overview

Written in the years leading up to 1872, The Birth of Tragedy is foremost a philosophical narrative voiced over the history of Greek art, from the earliest mythologies to the last of the tragedians. Nietzsche reads the evolution of Greek art – and by extension, Greek civilization – as the story of the Greeks’ evolving existential relationship with suffering and the world. What Nietzsche proposes to us in this study is that we can see Greek tragedy arising out of a long struggle between different art forms, a struggle that has its artistic, philosophical, psychological and historical dimensions. This struggle is defined in terms of the two chief art deities of Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysos. The Apolline and Dionysiac are foremost artistic forces, or drives that manifest as different forms of art: so that Apolline art, such as epic poetry and sculpture, is beautiful, calming and sunlike in its charm, just like the figure of Apollo himself; the art of Dionysos, on the other hand – music, dance and lyric poetry – is transfixing, orgiastic and intoxicating, delivering an effect akin to that which bewitched the Dionysiac revellers. However, in their philosophical dimensions Nietzsche’s characterizations of these two gods are a response to the Schopenhauerian distinction between the world as will and as representation, and are seen as aestheticized forces of nature unmediated by the human subject. This lends a curious, quasi-ontological air to this dialectical pair of gods, and opens the door to understanding Nietzsche’s response to the wider German philosophical tradition. In their psychological aspects, Nietzsche reads Apollo and Dionysos variously as states of consciousness (in creating as well as encountering their respective art forms), and also as psychological interactions of one with the other in the dialectical movement presented to us as the precursor to Attic tragedy. Lastly, in so far as the history and fate of Greek art has been determined by the Apolline and Dionysiac forces, the wider Greek cultural spirit can be seen to divide into Apolline and Dionysiac ages.

To spell this situation out a little more is to see the fundamentality of Nietzsche’s claims in The Birth of Tragedy and why he remained attached to the themes of this first book. In its philosophical aspect – which is certainly the dominant aspect of the work – The Birth of Tragedy attempts to understand how Greek culture functioned and, specifically, how Greek art was a response to the fundamental pessimism the Greeks so honestly opened themselves to and confronted. This pessimism received its philosophical articulation most acutely and much later with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, but, by Nietzsche’s reckoning, the Greeks suffered the brutalities of life and knew this suffering intimately.¹

What we see in Nietzsche’s philosophical interpretation of the history of Greek culture is that the two art patrons, Apollo and Dionysos, work against one another in a kind of natural dialectic, a struggle whereby each drive becomes more powerful and elevated each time it supersedes its opposite. This dialectic occurs until the advent of tragedy, where these two forces, articulated through an exquisite abundance of aesthetic drive, work in concert with one another, reconciling by combining the best elements of each to produce the tragic plays. The philosophical importance of these tragic plays, though, does not lie in the mere fact of the two drives resolving in a dialectical synthesis. The importance of tragedy is understood by what it achieves for the suffering Greek. Rather than resign from life and perish, as is the temptation of the weaker individual in the face of pessimistic despair, the Greeks elevated the abhorrent side of the world and human nature in the figure of the Dionysiac tragic hero and his fall – yet this Dionysiac fervour is supported by the splendid, calming and seductive Apolline imagery that presents to us this terrible truth of the world. Here Nietzsche believes history to have reached an unequivocal apex: for at this moment an entire culture had transfigured suffering and the looming threat of pessimism into a joyous affirmation of existence. With this moment, we have the leitmotif of The Birth of Tragedy, that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified” (BT, 33).

For Nietzsche, what the Greeks had discovered at the height of their aesthetic powers was that existence is not to be resigned from or negated, but affirmed as it is in its suffering and beauty alike. Whereas the truth of the world was capable of destroying a man completely, the mode of the tragic play could reveal such a truth as a Dionysiac phenomenon but present it in the seductive, soothing language of Apolline art. This accomplishment is no mere historical phenomenon, or some archaic interpretation worth noting among the many ideas in the history of civilization: this is the greatest example of a culturally prosperous people, and one that bears urgent philosophical lessons to the present. Thence we have the second half of The Birth of Tragedy.

The key to understanding how The Birth of Tragedy links with nineteenth-century Europe for Nietzsche is to grant that contemporary culture is inherited from Socrates, who in turn was the great anti-tragedian, the great anti-aesthete, and the catalyst (along with Euripides) for the decline and death of tragedy. So to understand our contemporary culture we need to turn back to the tensions between Socrates and tragedy, and how the rise and dominance of the Socratic spelled the decline and dormancy of the aesthetic revaluation of existence that the Greeks perfected with tragedy.

Socrates is an ambiguous character for Nietzsche’s wider philosophy on many counts, but in The Birth of Tragedy his role is as the villain of our philosophical story.² At base Socrates represents a type not encountered before, a human with limited capacity for creativity and little receptivity to art – and certainly not the Dionysiac. But since even a Socrates must put up some pretence in the face of the trials of suffering and the abyss of existence, Socrates wields reason in order to live. With Socrates we have the birth of scientific optimism.

Science for Nietzsche,³ synonymous with Socratism, is the notion “that the depths of nature can be fathomed and that knowledge can heal all ills” (BT, 82). This is simply incomprehensible to the Dionysiac Greek, whose natural world is understood as a miraculous manifestation of the gods, and whose ills are a yoke to be shouldered at the behest of divine will and mandate. Socrates, however, abets the decline of an aesthetic engagement with existence by promising that the rational understanding of the world can reveal a better way to live. Partly Socratism proposes that there are rational strategies for meeting the suffering of existence, such as morality and a scientific comprehension of the world; yet we also see that it is the very search for rational comprehension and the moral good that is a diversion away from the tragic truth of our existence.

The revelation for modern culture, whose Socratism is evident in various Enlightenment projects ranging from natural science to philosophical endeavour itself, is that this scientific optimism is at bottom a flawed illusion. Admittedly, the tragic plays are also illusions (they are certainly not real, factual or historical), but since tragedy meets the absurdity of suffering directly it is and will always be the most honest – the most authentic – of illusions. Socratic optimism begins to erode with the Kantian epistemology, whereby (on Nietzsche’s reading) the unknowability of the thing-in-itself destroys the notion that science can fathom the depths of nature. Science really collapses, however, with the Schopenhauerian expression of pessimism: the rational, metaphysical understanding that life is not worth living. With Schopenhauer the Socratic hermeneutic comes full circle and undermines itself, so that the ultimate value of science – the optimistic enterprise of rational discovery for the betterment of life – reaches its own fallacy and turns into a pure, pessimistic negation of existence.

With this diagnosis of the relationship between modern culture and the recent pessimism of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche believed that Europe was destined to recognize that its Socratic foundations were erroneous and inauthentic. Therefore, faced once again with the bare truth about existence, humanity would find itself at the cusp of a new tragic existence, with freedoms and possibilities not dreamt of since the Greeks. A rebirth of tragedy was imminent, by Nietzsche’s judgement, and both he and its musical champion Richard Wagner were set to usher in this new age.

This is where The Birth of Tragedy leaves us, at the watershed of two modes of existence and a future full of Dionysiac promise. Now, if you sense a certain naivety about the direction of the second half of The Birth of Tragedy (especially in the last few sections), then you are met with wide agreement. Nietzsche’s first foray into philosophy has since often attracted the criticism (including from Nietzsche himself) that the second half of the book was a hasty Wagnerian postlude to an otherwise considered work⁴ (with harsher critics adding that the first half is merely an epigraph to the Schopenhauerian philosophy). Fortunately, these sorts of judgements do not invalidate the text, and can instead help us to see genuine philosophical problems with The Birth of Tragedy and therefore a pathway into Nietzsche’s mature philosophy of the 1880s. The Birth of Tragedy is not merely Wagnerian or Schopenhauerian, but the product of a precocious mind and youthful exuberance in the face of bold, new philosophical ideas. The thesis of the rebirth of tragedy, flawed though it may be, is nevertheless brilliant, if not telling. When speaking of the naivety of Nietzsche’s thesis we should be reminded of his remarks in section 3 that t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Nietzsche and the influences on The Birth of Tragedy
• 2 Apollo and Dionysos in dialectic (§§1–6)
• 3 The tragic moment (§§7–10)
• 4 The decline and death of Greek tragedy (§§11-15)
• 5 Modernity and the rebirth of tragedy (§§16–25)
• 6 Appraising The Birth of Tragedy: Nietzsche in his later writings
• Nietzsche's life and works
• Further reading
• Bibliography
• Index