Study Guide to The Birth of Tragedy and Other Works by Friedrich Nietzsche

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645421351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Guías de estudio
• Subtopic: Guías de estudio

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. Titles in this study guide include The Birth of Tragedy, Genealogy of Morals, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Beyond Good and Evil.As a prominent influencer of modern intellectual history, Nietzsche's writings on human nature, morality, and individuality have wielded an enormous impact on Western philosophy. His attempts to expose the motives that underlie traditional Western religion, morality, and philosophy can be seen through his continual use of value as a theme in his work. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Nietzsche's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

 

Friedrich Nietzsche was born near Leipzig, Germany, on October 15, 1844. His father, who died of an injury before young Friedrich’s sixth birthday, was a Lutheran pastor. The death of his father left him in the charge of his mother, his sister, and three other female relatives. The family moved from Roecken, the village of his birth, to Naumberg, where he attended a well-known school (the Pforta school) until 1864. He then entered Bonn University, and moved to Leipzig in 1865, where he studied philology. There he came under the influence of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), through the latter’s book, The World as Will and Idea. Schopenhauer’s view of the world is essentially a pessimistic one, and much of Nietzsche’s later work was directed against this pessimism.

Nietzsche was an excellent student, and he received a teaching position in classical philology at Basle, Switzerland, in 1868, at the age of 24, before completing his doctorate. He remained in this post for ten years. For four of these years, he was an intimate friend of the composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883). This friendship came to an end, however, when Nietzsche rejected Wagner’s return to religious sentiments, marked by the appearance of the opera Parsifal. The relationship with Wagner had a lasting effect upon Nietzsche’s thought, and he was always interested in Wagner as a representative of the artistic temperament.

Nietzsche’s first books were published during his employment at Basle. The Birth of Tragedy appeared in 1872, followed by Untimely Meditations (1873-76) and Human, All Too Human (1878-79), parts one and two. By the year 1879, his interest in philology as a primary topic had waned, although his linguistic study became incorporated into his philosophic technique. He was beset by illness, and he finally left his teaching post. His recovery was marked by the publication in 1880 of part three of Human, All Too Human, and The Dawn (1881). Nietzsche was convinced that the painful period of illness had refined and strengthened his insight and his intellectual skill. That this conceit was not unjustified is clearly shown by the remarkable surety with which he dissects contemporary society and anticipates future philosophical, psychological, and political developments.

In the years 1880-1889, Nietzsche wrote his well-known Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), as well as The Gay Science (1882-86), Beyond Good and Evil (1885-86), and The Genealogy of Morals (1887). Ecce Homo, an elaborate self-appraisal, and The Antichrist, a criticism of Christianity, were also written in this period, although they were published after 1890. His “last” work, The Will to Power, was never completed, but a collection of his notes was published under this title in 1904. In 1888, he again fell ill. After increasingly severe attacks of paralysis, he succumbed (August 25, 1900).

The four books treated in this Study Guide represent nearly the entire span of Nietzsche’s creative life. The Birth of Tragedy, although primarily a discussion of the Greek tragic drama and the nature of art, presents several leading themes of his later work. Value, as a synthesis of the chaotic and the formal elements in life, and the continual recurrence of such synthesis, are among these themes. Here, also, he introduces his theory of tragic drama as a mingling of the “Dionysian” and the “Apollonian” - God-names which symbolize the dualism of the formless, active, and undifferentiated, on the one hand, and the formal “image” on the other.

The remaining three works are closely related. Beyond Good and Evil is an elaboration of some of the more obscure points in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and The Genealogy of Morals is a detailed study of topics which appear in shorter form in Beyond Good and Evil, particularly the study of the ideals of asceticism and the notion of justice as punishment.

Because of the close relationship of these works, every attempt has been made to present cross-references, so that the student may correlate passages which deal with the same subject. This has been particularly the case in the “middle” book, Beyond Good and Evil, in which references to both the earlier and later volumes are given as often as possible. The prophetic character of Nietzsche’s thought cannot be overlooked, and references are also given to modern works which bear upon the topic.

The four books differ greatly in form. The first and the last are the most continuous in structure. The two “middle” works are more artistic in character. Zarathustra’s four parts are made up of short chapters, some of which reach high levels of poetic metaphor. However “loose” it may appear, however, the book actually has a high degree of artistic unity. Because it takes the form of a narrative of events in the life of Zarathustra, the action and the commentary have been kept separate, so that the “story line” may be followed more easily.

If any one conceptual “tool” is central in Nietzsche’s philosophy, it is his rejection of “dualistic” interpretations of the world. Nietzsche was uncompromising in his belief that the understanding of the universe in terms of extreme opposites, such as those of “mind” and “body,” was false. But his view is not monistic, in the sense that he accepts any one such element as “real” and rejects its opposite (this would still be a tacit acceptance of irreconcilable opposites). Instead, he asserted the possibility of a development of one extreme out of the other, contradicting the “prejudice” that nothing can arise out of its opposite. Nietzsche’s position is, as a result, extremely close to that of the American philosopher John Dewey, who held to a “principle of continuity” and whose conviction that the highest intellectual functions are developmentally related to the lowest organic behavior parallels Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power as a biological law.

This same rejection of dualism is given a less psychological (but no less vehement) expression in the philosophy of the contemporary British thinker Gilbert Ryle, whose book, The Concept of Mind, is an elaborate polemic against the separation of mind and body. Nietzsche carried his own rejection of “opposites” into the field of human intercourse, affirming, for example, that friendship and enmity are closely related, that justice and criminality are reciprocal, and that the highest spiritual values may even derive their worth from the deepest sensuality. His own account of the “prejudice of opposites” is to be found in chapter one of Beyond Good and Evil. It is strongly recommended that this chapter, “Prejudices of Philosophers,” be read prior to the study of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

In general, Nietzsche expresses himself in brief passages, many of which say the same thing in a slightly different way. In order to facilitate study, a Key to Important Passages has been included in this Study Guide, which correlates the main sections in which six of Nietzsche’s most characteristic views are discussed: the Superman, the Will to Power, Eternal Recurrence, Self-overcoming, Reality and Knowledge, and Nihilism. The headings in the discussion of The Birth of Tragedy have been introduced for the student’s convenience; they are not, however, present in the original work. They have been introduced to make the task of organization and reference easier.

Nietzsche was a literary as well as philosophical genius, and it is not entirely possible to convey, in a Study Guide of this nature, the depth of mood and range of expression which is to be found in the original. It is hoped, therefore, that the student will also consult the actual texts, in order to “feel” Nietzsche’s ideas in their original setting. A bibliography has been included for this purpose.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

APOLLO AND DIONYSOS

The development of art is the result of a constant interplay between two contending elements in the creative life of man: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. These terms are taken from the names of two gods of ancient Greece, Apollo, the god of prophecy and patron of the arts, and Dionysos, the god of wine and the vineyards. Nietzsche views these two mythical figures as the personifications of opposing creative tendencies in man. By constant opposition, each stimulates the other to further effort, and the result is the growth of art. But the two tendencies also have a certain dependency upon one another, and in the Greek tragedy, a form of staged drama which was widely popular in ancient Greece, a balance of the two tendencies was achieved.

DREAM AND INTOXICATION

The Apollonian tendency is closely related to dreaming. Dreaming, says Nietzsche, is a means of interpreting life through images. The dreamer, the image-maker, takes a deep delight in the myriad forms and shapes of the dream images, which are not perceived by the intellect, but by the artistic (aesthetic) sense. An essential part of the experience of dreams is an ever-present realization that the images are not real, but illusory. Nietzsche calls this the “fair illusion of the dream sphere.” Apollo represents the arts in which images are deliberately produced as an interpretation of existence. These are called the plastic arts, such as painting and sculpture. Such images, however, must always preserve the feeling of illusion, or they will fail in preserving artistic quality, presenting instead merely “crass reality.” Thus the Apollonian tendency is the tendency to impose form and order upon the world. Nietzsche, in consequence, refers to Apollo as representing a principle of individuation, by which he means a principle which separates elements of a fluctuating world into individual units and places them in ordered, understandable relation to each other. Dionysos, on the other hand, represents the destruction of individuality. Physical intoxication is analogous to the “glorious transport” of “Dionysiac rapture.” The Dionysiac state is one in which the boundaries between individuals are destroyed. In it, a sense of mystical unity with the universe is experienced. The universe itself is seen to be a unity, a “one.” Seized by the Dionysian spirit, an individual abandons the social veneer of intellectual rules, and “forgets himself completely.” Dionysos represents, then the overpowering urges of a primitive response to the coming of spring - an uninhibited, free, and direct communion with the deep mysteries of nature which defy formal understanding, and to which all images stand opposed as Apollonian illusion to the Dionysian reality.

THE ARTIST

Every artist, as an artist, seeks to represent these moods in an artistic medium. The poets who were the authors of Greek tragedy unified both elements. An image which succeeds in expressing “complete oneness with the essence of the universe” would be at once an Apollonian and a Dionysian artistic triumph. The Greeks were able to control Dionysian urges through an intense worship of Apollonian form in art. Nietzsches contrasts them with “Dionysiac barbarians” who, imitating the Satyrs (servants of Dionysos devoted to sensual pleasure), allowed themselves to be overcome in celebrations of wild and unrestrained revelry. But even for the Greeks, Dionysos is not subdued, but only pacified. In the “treaty” that bound the two forces to respect each other, Nietzsche sees “the most important event in the history of Greek ritual.” As long as the basically destructive Dionysian force can express itself in the form of an Apollonian image, a sense of deep reality may be achieved without the risk of losing all anchors and being cast adrift in a terrifying maelstrom.

WISDOM OF DIONYSOS

Nietzsche relates the legendary answer of Silenus, a companion of Dionysos, to King Midas. Upon being asked what was the greatest good of man, Silenus replied, “What would be best for you is quite beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best is to die soon.” In this reply, Silenus expresses the Dionysian truth that existence in the form of an individual is a painful thing, because individuality is at root an illusion and must be supported by illusions. Dionysian reality, opposed to illusion, is nonrational, and no individual can survive, as an individual, within it.

THE OLYMPIAN GODS

Nietzsche comes to the conclusion that the Greeks, keenly aware of the pain of existence, were forced to create the mythical world of the gods in order to live at all. The gods “justified human life by living it themselves.” The Greeks saw the gods as images of themselves, much as one sees oneself mirrored in a dream, while still aware that the image is not really oneself, but rather a “fair illusion.” By means of such illusion, the Greeks withstood their suffering. Such “illusion,” whether in dream, myth, or art, need not be pleasant. What matters most is the presence of form and control over the basically irrational and uncontrolled nature of the universe.

GREEK NATURALISM

The Greeks were not in a simple state of rapturous harmony with nature, as some, such as Rousseau (a famous eighteenth-century French thinker), may have thought. The Greek connection with nature was complex, not simple. It was born out of the connection between art and pain.

BEAUTY IN ART

Beauty is not to be found in mere imitation of nature, but in a successful imposition of Apollonian form upon the primitive Dionysian urge. In true beauty, pain and joy blend into one: “… in every exuberant joy there is an undertone of terror.”

Nietzsche speaks of Beauty as a kind of redemption. It is a “redemption through illusion,” in which an individual comes to know himself. Apollo “demands self-control” and awareness of the limits of the individual will. The constant onslaught of the Dionysian, under which the individual may lose himself completely, demands a repeated renewal of self-awareness. Thus Greek art, with its emphasis upon form, rhythm, and harmony, is not a sign of the absence of Dionysos, but rather a bastion of defense against his constant presence. Greek art, he says, is like “a perpetual military encampment … against the titanic and barbaric menace of Dionysos.”

ARTISTIC OBJECTIVITY

Yet knowledge of self through art is not a sign that art is purely personal and subjective. Rather, art stimulates a renewal of self, a reconstruction of form after each attack by the self-destroying Dionysian force. All is lost in art, if it is interpreted as mere subjective expression of personal will. Art demands a “triumph over personal will and desire,” and must embody “objectivity and disinterested contemplation.” The true artist must go through a Dionysiac phase, in which he rejects personal feelings and becomes “identified with the original oneness.” Only those Apollonian images which arise in reaction to the pain of losing oneself are artistic in the true sense.

WORLD JUSTIFICATION

Tragedy, the highest expression of true art as an Apollonian-Dionysian combination, is not only a “metaphysical solace,” an illusion necessary to sustain life; it is a means of interpreting the world as an artistic product. Only as su...