Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy: From the Spirit of Music

By Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The Birth of Tragedy" stands alongside Aristotle's "Poetics" as essential works for all who seek to understand poetry and its relationship to human life. In this, his first book, Nietzsche developed a way of thinking about the arts that unites the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus as the central symbol of human existence. Although tragedy serves as the focus of this work, music, visual art, dance, and the other arts can also be viewed using Nietzsche's analysis and integration of the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SAGA Egmont
• Release date: Jul 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9788726627497

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

German psychologist and philosopher FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE (1844-1900) was appointed special professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at the precocious age of 24, but soon found himself dissatisfied with academic life and created an alternative intellectual society for himself among friends including composer Richard Wagner, historian Jakob Burckhardt, and theologian Franz Overbeck. Among his philosophical works are Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and Ecce Homo.

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We will have gained much concerning aesthetic knowledge if we arrive not only at logical insight but at a secure firsthand realization that the advance of the arts is tied to the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, similar to the generation of the duality of the sexes that brings about constant battle and only periodically achieves reconciliation. We borrow these names from the Greeks who did not grasp the profound and secret lessons regarding the perception of their art in concepts, but from making their insights known to the discerning viewer through clear and convincing figures from the realm of their gods. Our insight is tied to the two gods of the arts, Apollo and Dionysus; in the Greek world we encounter an enormous contrast in origin and goals between the art of the visual creator—the Apollonian—and the art of music—the Dionysian. Both of these different forces exist next to each other, mostly in open conflict, always provoking each other to achieve new and powerful births in order to perpetuate the battle of the opposites inside them that only apparently unite in the mutual word art until, finally, by means of a metaphysical act of magic Hellenic will, both appear together as a pair. In the end this pairing simultaneously produces the Dionysian and Apollonian art of Attic Tragedy.

In order to understand both of these forces, we must first think of them as two separate worlds—of dreams and of ecstasy. Between those forces, the physical appearances of opposites between the Apollonian and Dionysian become apparent. According to the vision of Lucretius, the magnificent divine figures first appeared to the souls of people in a dream, and in this dream the great sculptor saw the delightful form of superhuman beings, and the Hellenic poet, when questioned about the secrets of poetic creation, would likewise be reminded of the dream and would have given instructions such as Hans Sachs gives to the mastersingers:

My friend, this then is the poet’s work,

That in his dream he finds and shows,

Believe me, mankind’s truest vision

That opens up for him in dreams;

All art of poetry and all attempts to it

Are nothing but interpreting the truth of dreams.

The beautiful appearance of the world of dreams, where everyone in its creation is a perfect artist, is the precondition of all fine arts, and also, as we will see, an important part of poetry. We enjoy the immediate understanding of a shape; all forms speak to us; and there is nothing indifferent and unimportant. In the highest experience of this reality of dreams, we still have the sense of its translucent appearance—such at least is my own experience.

I could affirm the prevalence and even normality of this with many testimonies and confirmations by the poets. People inclined to philosophy suspect that even the reality in which we are and live contain another one that is hidden and is also only an appearance. Schopenhauer even identifies this gift as a mark of philosophical talent; at certain times all people and all things take place merely as phantoms and as images in dreams. Just as the philosopher relates to the reality of existence, so the artistically sensitive person relates to the reality of dreams by observing them clearly and with pleasure. From these images the meaning of life is disclosed and practiced. But not only the pleasant and friendly images are fully understood and personally experienced. That which is serious, gloomy, sad and sinister, sudden inhibitions, accidental teasing, fearful expectations, simply the entire divine comedy of life, including the inferno, passes by, but not only as a shadow-play—because one lives and suffers in these scenes—and yet not without a fleeting sense of illusion. I (and many people like me) remember that in the dangers and fright of my nightmare have called out encouraged and successful: It is a dream! I want to dream some more! I have been told that certain people manage to continue the power of one and the same dream for three or more continuous nights. These facts demonstrate clearly that our innermost being, the common basis of us all, experiences the dream itself with deep pleasure and joyful necessity.

The Greeks, through their Apollo, also expressed this joyful necessity of the experience of dreams. Apollo, the god of all sculptural powers, is simultaneously the god of soothsaying. Due to his roots as the Shining One (the god of light), he also commands the beautiful radiance of the inner world of fantasy. The higher truth, the perfection of the circumstances in contrast to the flawed understanding of everyday reality, and then the deep consciousness of nature healing and helping in sleep and in dreams, is simultaneously the analog of the soothsaying ability and of the arts in general by which life becomes possible and worth living. The dream image must not transgress that fine line and thereby produce a pathological effect. Where the light would adversely deceive us with crude reality, this fine line does not lack the image of Apollo, which is that decisive limitation, that freedom from wilder impulses, and that wise calmness of the creative god.

In harmony with his origin, his eye must be like the sun; even in anger and discontent the blessing of beautiful radiance rests on him. Thus, what might be true for Apollo in an eccentric way is what Schopenhauer says in World as Will and Idea (I, p. 416) about human beings caught in the veil of Maya: As on a raging sea, which raises and lowers howling mountains of waves boundlessly in all directions, a sailor sits in his boat trusting his craft. In the same way a person calmly sits in the center of a world of tribulations, trusting and supported by the principle of individuality. One might say about Apollo that by the unshakable trust in that principle and the calm acceptance of the apprehension in him, he achieved his most sublime expression. We might even wish to identify Apollo as the magnificent divine image of the principle of individuality from whose bearings and glances all the pleasure and wisdom of the radiance as well as its beauty speaks to us.

In that same place Schopenhauer described the horrendous dread that overcomes us when we suddenly find ourselves confused by the unrecognizable form of appearances because there seems to be an exception to the principle of reason in any of its formulations. When we add to this dread the delightful rapture that arises from the breaking of the principle of individuality that arises out of the innermost ground of human beings—or even of nature—we get a glimpse of the essence of the Dionysian that is most closely imparted to us through the analogy of intoxication. Either through the influence of the narcotic drink, which all primordial human beings and peoples refer to in hymns, or due to the powerful and passionately permeating approach of spring in all of nature, those Dionysian stirrings awake, and in their climax the subjectivity fades away into complete self-forgetfulness. Likewise, in the German Middle Ages, increasingly large hordes wallowed under the Dionysian power, singing and dancing from town to town. In these dances celebrating Saint John and Saint Vitus,