The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)

By Friedrich Nietzsche

This eBook features the unabridged text of ‘The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’ from the bestselling edition of ‘The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche’.

Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Nietzsche includes original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of the author, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily.

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* The complete unabridged text of ‘The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’
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• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Jul 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781788778572

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) on saksalainen filosofi, runoilija ja filologi.

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The Complete Works of

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

VOLUME 6 OF 24

The Birth of Tragedy

Parts Edition

By Delphi Classics, 2015

Version 1

COPYRIGHT

‘The Birth of Tragedy’

Friedrich Nietzsche: Parts Edition (in 24 parts)

First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Delphi Classics.

© Delphi Classics, 2017.

All rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

ISBN: 978 1 78877 857 2

Delphi Classics

is an imprint of

Delphi Publishing Ltd

Hastings, East Sussex

United Kingdom

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Friedrich Nietzsche: Parts Edition

This eBook is Part 6 of the Delphi Classics edition of Friedrich Nietzsche in 24 Parts. It features the unabridged text of The Birth of Tragedy from the bestselling edition of the author’s Complete Works. Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. Our Parts Editions feature original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily.

Visit here to buy the entire Parts Edition of Friedrich Nietzsche or the Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche in a single eBook.

Learn more about our Parts Edition, with free downloads, via this link or browse our most popular Parts here.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

IN 24 VOLUMES

Parts Edition Contents

The Philosophical Writings

1, Homer and the Classical Philology

2, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions

3, The Greek State and Other Fragments

4, The Relation Between a Schopenhauerian Philosophy and a German Culture

5, Homer’s Contest

6, The Birth of Tragedy

7, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

8, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

9, Thoughts Out of Season

10, Human, All Too Human

11, The Dawn of Day

12, The Joyful Wisdom

13, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

14, Beyond Good and Evil

15, The Genealogy of Morals

16, The Case of Wagner

17, The Twilight of the Idols

18, The Antichrist

19, Nietzsche Contra Wagner

20, The Will to Power

21, We Philologists

The Poetry

22, Collected Poems

The Autobiography

23, Ecce Homo

The Criticism

24, The Criticism

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The Birth of Tragedy

Translated by W. A. Haussmann

This 1872 work of dramatic theory was Nietzsche’s first published book. It was reissued in 1886 as The Birth of Tragedy, Or: Hellenism and Pessimism, containing a prefatory essay, An Attempt at Self-Criticism.

Nietzsche believed that classical Athenian tragedy was an art form that transcended the pessimism and nihilism of what he saw as a fundamentally meaningless world. The Greek spectators, by looking into the abyss of human suffering and affirming it, passionately affirmed the meaning of their own existence. They knew themselves to be infinitely more than mere individuals, finding self-affirmation not in another life, not in a world to come, but in the terror and ecstasy celebrated in the performance of their tragedies.

Originally educated as a philologist, Nietzsche discusses the history of the tragic form and introduces an intellectual dichotomy between the Dionysian and the Apollonian (reality as disordered and undifferentiated by forms versus reality as ordered and differentiated by forms). Nietzsche claims life always involves a struggle between these two elements, each battling for control over the existence of humanity.

Nietzsche proposes that the tragedy of Ancient Greece was the highest form of art due to its mixture of both Apollonian and Dionysian elements into one seamless whole, allowing the spectator to experience the full spectrum of the human condition. The Dionysian element was to be found in the music of the chorus, while the Apollonian element was contained in the dialogue, providing a concrete symbolism that balanced the Dionysiac revelry. Therefore, the Apollonian spirit was able to give form to the abstract Dionysian.

The Birth of Tragedy is evidently the work of a young man, revealing the influence of many of the philosophers Nietzsche had been studying. His interest in classical Greece as a rational society can be partly attributed to the influence of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, although Nietzsche departed from Winckelmann in many ways. In addition, Nietzsche uses the term ‘naïve’ in exactly the sense used by Friedrich Schiller. The Apollonian experience bears great similarity to the experience of the world as ‘representation’ in Schopenhauer’s sense and the experience of the Dionysian bears similarities to the identification with the world as ‘will’. Nietzsche opposed Schopenhauer’s Buddhistic negation of the will. He argues that life is worth living despite the enormous amount of cruelty and suffering that exists.

The Birth of Tragedy was severely criticised by many respected professional scholars of Greek literature. Particularly vehement was the philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who denounced Nietzsche’s work as careless and misleading. Prompted by Nietzsche, Erwin Rohde, a friend that had written a favourable review that sparked the first derogatory debate over the book, responded by exposing Wilamowitz-Moellendorf’s inaccurate citations of Nietzsche’s work. Richard Wagner also issued a response to Wilamowitz-Moellendorf’s critique, but his action only served to characterise Nietzsche as the composer’s lackey.

The first edition

CONTENTS

ATTEMPT AT A SELF-CRITICISM (1886)

PREFACE TO RICHARD WAGNER (1871)

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

A pioneering Hellenist, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) was a German art historian and archaeologist, whose work inspired the young Nietzsche.

ATTEMPT AT A SELF-CRITICISM (1886)

1

Whatever may be at the bottom of this questionable book, it must have been an exceptionally significant and fascinating question, and deeply personal at that: the time in which it was written, in spite of which it was written, bears witness to that — the exciting time of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. As the thunder of the Battle of Wörth was rolling over Europe, the muser and riddle-friend who was to be the father of this book sat somewhere in an alpine nook, very bemused and beriddled, hence very concerned and yet unconcerned, and wrote down his thoughts about the Greeks — the core of the strange and almost inaccessible book to which this belated preface (or postscript) shall now be added. A few weeks later — and he himself was to be found under the walls of Metz, still wedded to the question marks that he had placed after the alleged cheerfulness of the Greeks and of Greek art. Eventually, in that month of profoundest suspense when the peace treaty was being debated at Versailles, he, too, made peace with himself and, slowly convalescing from an illness contracted at the front, completed the final draft of The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. — Out of music? Music and tragedy? Greeks and the music of tragedy? Greeks and the art form of pessimism? The best turned out, most beautiful, most envied type of humanity to date, those most apt to seduce us to life, the Greeks — how now? They of all people should of needed tragedy? Even more — art? For what — Greek art?

You will guess where the big question mark concerning the value of existence has thus been raised. Is pessimism necessarily a sign of decline, decay, degeneration, weary and weak instincts — as it once was in India and now is, to all appearances, among us, modern men and Europeans? Is there pessimism of strength? An intellectual predilection for the hard, gruesome, evil, problematic aspect of existence, prompted by well-being, by overflowing health, by the fullness of existence? Is it perhaps possible to suffer precisely from overfullness? The sharp-eyed courage that tempts and attempts, that craves the frightful as the enemy, the worthy enemy, against whom one can test one’s strength? From whom one can learn what it means to be frightened? What is the significance of the tragic myth among the Greeks of the best, the strongest, the most courageous period? And the tremendous phenomenon of the Dionysian — and, born from it, tragedy — what might they signify? — And again: that of which tragedy died, the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, frugality, and cheerfulness of the theoretical man — how now? Might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of weariness, of infection, of the anarchical dissolution of the instincts? And the Greek cheerfulness of the later Greeks — merely the afterglow of the sunset? The Epicureans resolve against pessimism — a mere precaution of the afflicted? And science itself, our science — indeed, what is the significance of all science, viewed as a symptom of life? For what — worse yet, whence — all science? How now? Is the resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from, pessimism? A subtle last resort against — truth? And, morally speaking, a sort of cowardice and falseness? Amorally speaking, a ruse? O Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? O enigmatic ironist, was that perhaps your — irony?

2

What I then got hold of, something frightful and dangerous, a problem with horns but not necessarily a bull, in any case a new problem — today I should say that it was the problem of science itself, science considered for the first time as problematic, as questionable. But the book in which my youthful courage and suspicion found an outlet — what an impossible book had to result from a task so uncongenial to youth! Constructed from a lot of immature, overgreen personal experiences, all of them close to the limits of communication, presented in the context of art — for the problem of science cannot be recognized in the context of science — a book perhaps for artists who also have an analytic and retrospective penchant (in other words, an exceptional type of artist for whom one might have to look far and wide and really would not care to look); a book full of psychological innovations and artists’ secrets, with an artists’ metaphysics in the background; a youthful work full of the intrepid mood of youth, the moodiness of youth, independent, defiantly self-reliant even where it seems to bow before an authority and personal reverence; in sum, a first book, also in every bad sense of that label. In spite of the problem which seems congenial to old age, the book is marked by every defect of youth, with its length in excess: and its storm and stress." On the other hand, considering its success (especially with the great artist to whom it addressed itself as in a dialogue, Richard Wagner), it is a proven book, I mean one that in any case satisfied the best minds of the time. In view of that, it really ought to be treated with some consideration and taciturnity. Still, I do not want to suppress entirely how disagreeable it now seems to me, how strange it appears now, after sixteen years — before a much older, a hundred times more demanding, but by no means colder eye which has not become a stranger 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.

3

To say it once more: today I find it an impossible book: I consider it badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, in places saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof, mistrustful even of the propriety of proof, a book for initiates, music for those dedicated to music, those who are closely related to begin with on the basis of common and rare aesthetic experiences, music meant as a sign of recognition for close relatives in arbitus [In the arts.] — an arrogant and rhapsodic book that ought to exclude right from the beginning the profanum vulgus [The profane crowd.] of the educated even more than the mass or folk. Still, the effect of the book proved and proves that it had a knack for seeking our fellow-rhapsodizers and for luring them on to new secret paths and dancing places. What found expression here was anyway — this was admitted with as much curiosity as antipathy — a strange voice, the disciple of a still unknown God, one who concealed himself for the time being under the scholar’s hood, under the gravity and dialectical ill-humor of the German, even under the bad manners of the Wagnerian. Here was a spirit with strange, still nameless needs, a memory bursting with questions, experiences, concealed things after which the name of Dionysus was added as one more question mark. What spoke here — as was admitted, not without suspicion — was something like a mystical, almost maenadic soul that stammered with difficulty, a feat of the will, as in a strange tongue, almost undecided whether it should communicate or conceal itself. It should have sung, this new soul — and not spoken! What I had to say then — too bad that I did not dare say it as a poet: perhaps I had the ability. Or at least as a philologist: after all, even today practically everything in this field remains to be discovered and dug up by philologists! Above all, the problem that there is a problem here — and that the