The Birth of Tragedy (Dover Thrift Editions) [Paperback]

In this work, Nietzsche theorizes that Greek tragedy was built upon the wedding of two principles, which he associated with the deities Apollo and Dionysius. The Apollonian principle, in keeping with the characteristics of the sun god Apollo, is the principle of order, static beauty and clear boundaries. The Dionysian principle, in contrast, is the principle of frenzy, excess, and the collapse of boundaries.

These principles offered perspectives on the position of the individual human being, but perspectives that were radically opposed to one another. The Appollonian principle conceived the individual as sufficiently separate from the rest of reality to be able to contemplate it dispassionately. The Dionysian principle, however, presents reality as a tumultuous flux in which individuality is overwhelmed by the dynamics of a living whole. Nietzsche believed that a balance of these principals is essential if one is both to recognize the challenge to one's sense of meaning posed by individual vulnerability and to recognize the solution, which depends on one's sense of oneness with a larger reality. Greek tragedy, as he saw it, confronted the issue of life's meaning by merging the perspectives of the two principles.

The themes of Greek tragedy concerned the worst case scenario from an Apollonian point of view--the devastation of vulnerable individuals. Scholarship had concluded that the chanting of the chorus was the first form of Athenian tragedy. Nietzsche interpreted the effect of the chorus as the initiation of a Dionysian experience on the part of the audience. Captivated by music, audience members abandoned their usual sense of themselves as isolated individuals and felt themselves instead to be part of a larger, frenzied whole.

This sense of self as part of a dynamic whole gave a different ground for experiencing life as meaningful than one would recognize in the more typical Apollonian condition, which entails a certain psychic distance. Feeling oneself to be part of the joyous vitality of the whole, one could take participation in life to be intrinsically wonderful, despite the obvious vulnerabilities one experiences as individual. The aesthetic transformation of the audience member's sense of the significance of individual life aroused a quasi-religious affirmation of life's value. "It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified," Nietzsche concluded.

The function of characters and drama later added to tragedy depended on the fundamental, enthralled experience of oneness with the chorus, according to Nietzsche. Already incited to a Dionysian state before the tragic hero appeared on stage, the audience would see the character before them as a manifestation of the god Dionysius. Unfortunately, Euripides restructured tragedy in such a way that the chorus' role was diminished. Euripides wrote plays that would encourage an Appollonian stance of objective interest in the drama. Nietzsche contended that in his attempt to write intelligent plays, Euripides had killed tragedy. He had done so, moreover, because he had fallen under the influence of Socrates.

The Birth of Tragedy is the first of many works in which Nietzsche re-evaluates the traditional view that Socrates was the quintessential philosopher. Although granting that Socrates was a turning point in world history, Nietzsche contends that Socrates was responsible for directing Western culture toward an imbalanced, exaggerated reliance on the Apollonian point of view. A defender of reason to an irrational degree, Socrates had taught that reason could penetrate reality to the point that it could correct reality's flaws. This had become the fundamental dream of Western culture, a dream that was later manifested in the modern approach to scholarship. Unfortunately, the optimism of the Socratic rational project was doomed to failure. Reason itself, through Kant, had pointed to its own limits. Whatever reason might accomplish, it could not correct the most basic flaws in human reality--the facts of human vulnerability and mortality.

The Birth of Tragedy also involves an indictment of contemporary culture as well as an account of the significance of tragedy. Contemporary culture's reliance on reason and it's commitment to scientific optimism had rendered the modern individual largely oblivious to the Dionysian character of reality--character which engulfed all individuals in the flow of life but which also rendered everyone subject to death and devastation. The repression of vulnerability was psychologically disastrous, in Nietzsche's view. The only hope for modern culture was that it might turn to myth, which could compensate for the culture's excesses, before a crisis.

The Birth of Tragedy failed initially to secure esteem for Nietzsche among his philological colleagues. Nevertheless, the work has had enduring influence. In particular, the analysis of Apollo and Dionysius has had an impact on figures in diverse fields, among them Thomas Mann and C.G. Jung.

In The Case of Wagner (1888) and Nietzsche Contra Wagner (1895) Nietzsche analyzed and critiqued Wagner, and criticized his earlier views of Wagner. Since one of Nietzsche's early works, The Birth of Tragedy, and two of his later works were about Wagner, it would seem that the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner was significant to Nietzsche, even though he decided not to see Wagner again more than ten years before he wrote The Case of Wagner. Although his first work was a pro-Wagner work, his last work on Wagner was an anti-Wagner work. In The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche praised Bizet's Carmen, but condemned the works of Wagner. He says that it seems that in a music drama of Wagner, it always seems that someone is being redeemed. Indeed, some of Wagner's operas are about Christian concepts, and Nietzsche was against this. Nietzsche went on to insult Wagner by stating that Wagner's music is sick and corrupt and that Wagner is a decadent, even though it seems that no one realizes even in Paris that Wagner is a decadent. Not only did he accuse Wagner of being a decadent, but he also questioned whether Wagner was a musician at all. Nietzsche also stated that Wagnerian heroines were decadents like Madame Bovary and accused Wagner of writing nihilistic music.

There is no denying Nietzsche's genius. But there is denying mine. I found this book very hard to follow. It is not a book to stop and scrutinize every line. One must know a fair bit about Greek mythology to follow it adequately. His thoughts on Socrates compared to the Dionysian is very compelling. If anyone who has read this book wishes to share what they understood, please e-mail me.

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.