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    The Birth of Tragedy
    The Birth of Tragedy
    The Birth of Tragedy
    Ebook180 pages2 hours

    The Birth of Tragedy

    By Friedrich Nietzsche

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    Nietzsche's first published book, The Birth of Tragedy is a compelling argument for the necessity of art in life. This landmark work of criticism is fueled by Nietzsche's enthusiasms for Greek tragedy, the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the music of Wagner, to whom the book was dedicated. Nietzsche outlines a distinction between two central forces in art: the Apolline, representing beauty and order, and the Dionysiac, a primal or ecstatic reaction to the sublime. He argues that the combination of these states produced the highest forms of music and tragic drama, which not only reveal the truth about suffering in life, but also provide a consolation for it.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLogos
    Release dateApr 16, 2022
    ISBN9791221322910
    Author

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher and author. Born into a line of Protestant churchman, Nietzsche studied Classical literature and language before becoming a professor at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He became a philosopher after reading Schopenhauer, who suggested that God does not exist, and that life is filled with pain and suffering. Nietzsche’s first work of prominence was The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, which contained new theories regarding the origins of classical Greek culture. From 1883 to 1885 Nietzsche composed his most famous work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, in which he famously proclaimed that “God is dead.” He went on to release several more notable works including Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals, both of which dealt with the origins of moral values. Nietzsche suffered a nervous breakdown in 1889 and passed away in 1900, but not before giving us his most famous quote, “From life's school of war: what does not kill me makes me stronger.”

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      The Birth of Tragedy - Friedrich Nietzsche

      1

      We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics, when once we have perceived not only by logical inference, but by the immediate certainty of intuition, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the duplexity of the Apollonian and the Dionysian: in like manner as procreation is dependent on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual conflicts with only periodically intervening reconciliations. These names we borrow from the Greeks, who disclose to the intelligent observer the profound mysteries of their view of art, not indeed in concepts, but in the impressively clear figures of their world of deities. It is in connection with Apollo and Dionysus, the two art-deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there existed in the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in origin and aims, between the art of the shaper, the Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of music, that of Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies run parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance, and continually inciting each other to new and more powerful births, to perpetuate in them the strife of this antithesis, which is but seemingly bridged over by their mutual term Art; till at last, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic will, they appear paired with each other, and through this pairing eventually generate the equally Dionysian and Apollonian artwork of Attic tragedy.

      In order to bring these two tendencies within closer range, let us conceive them first of all as the separate art-worlds of dreamland and drunkenness; between which physiological phenomena a contrast may be observed analogous to that existing between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. In dreams, according to the conception of Lucretius, the glorious divine figures first appeared to the souls of men, in dreams the great shaper beheld the charming corporeal structure of superhuman beings, and the Hellenic poet, if consulted on the mysteries of poetic inspiration, would likewise have suggested dreams and would have offered an explanation resembling that of Hans Sachs in the Meistersingers:

      Mein Freund, das grad’ ist Dichters Werk,

      dass er sein Träumen deut’ und merk’.

      Glaubt mir, des Menschen wahrster Wahn

      wird ihm im Traume aufgethan:

      all’ Dichtkunst und Poeterei

      ist nichts als Wahrtraum-Deuterei.

      The beauteous appearance of the dream-worlds, in the production of which every man is a perfect artist, is the presupposition of all plastic art, and in fact, as we shall see, of an important half of poetry also. We take delight in the immediate apprehension of form; all forms speak to us; there is nothing indifferent, nothing superfluous. But, together with the highest life of this dream-reality we also have, glimmering through it, the sensation of its appearance: such at least is my experience, as to the frequency, ay, normality of which I could adduce many proofs, as also the sayings of the poets. Indeed, the man of philosophic turn has a foreboding that underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed, and that therefore it is also an appearance; and Schopenhauer actually designates the gift of occasionally regarding men and things as mere phantoms and dream-pictures as the criterion of philosophical ability. Accordingly, the man susceptible to art stands in the same relation to the reality of dreams as the philosopher to the reality of existence; he is a close and willing observer, for from these pictures he reads the meaning of life, and by these processes he trains himself for life. And it is perhaps not only the agreeable and friendly pictures that he realizes in himself with such perfect understanding: the earnest, the troubled, the dreary, the gloomy, the sudden checks, the tricks of fortune, the uneasy presentiments, in short, the whole Divine Comedy of life, and the Inferno, also pass before him, not merely like pictures on the wall—for he too lives and suffers in these scenes,—and yet not without that fleeting sensation of appearance. And perhaps many a one will, like myself, recollect having sometimes called out cheeringly and not without success amid the dangers and terrors of dream-life: It is a dream! I will dream on! I have likewise been told of persons capable of continuing the causality of one and the same dream for three and even more successive nights: all of which facts clearly testify that our innermost being, the common substratum of all of us, experiences our dreams with deep joy and cheerful

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