On the surface, The Birth of Tragedy is a study on Greek tragedy, “one of the most suggestive and influential studies ever written” (p. 3) as Walter Kaufmann writes in his introduction. It is at the same time (and perhaps more significantly) a study on the ancient Greeks faced with the problem of existence, as well as an early investigation into scientific optimism embodied in the figure of Socrates.
 
Nietzsche identifies a basic duality embodied in Apollo and Dionysus, a duality that is the “artistic energies which burst forth from nature herself, without the mediation of the human artist” (p. 38). Apollo is the “ruler over the beautiful illusion or of the inner world of fantasy” (p. 35), the God of dream worlds that float calmly above the mundane and everyday. He is also the “glorious divine image of the principium individuationis” (p. 36), who contemplates the world, separate from it. Dionysus is the antonym of Apollo, the breakdown of the individual in metaphorical intoxication and self-forgetfulness—the return to communitas; Dionysus is the over-full lifeforce that breaks down boundaries, societal structures, barriers between human and human and human and nature: “nature, which has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man” (p. 37). This is a state of enchantment, of connection to the sacred, where in “song and in dance man experiences himself as a member of a higher community,” and “he is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art” (p. 37).
 
The Greeks resisted the Dionysus and Dionysian festivals in their environs until an eventual reconciliation. And with this “reconciliation is the most important moment in the history of the Greek cult…” (p. 39)—for in the reconciliation “the destruction of the principium individuationis for the first time becomes an artistic phenomenon” (p. 40).
 
In a sense, the reconciliation of Dionysus to the Apollinian Greeks was a foregone conclusion. Apollo, being the God of measure who delineates the individual, is in opposition to the “overweening pride and excess” of the Titans, the barbarians, of Dionysus. However, Apollo’s “entire existence rested on a hidden substratum of suffering and of knowledge, revealed to him by the Dionysian. And behold: Apollo could not live without Dionysus! The ‘titanic’ and the ‘barbaric’ were in the last analysis as necessary as the Apollinian” (p. 46). Dionysius as chaos, the uncategorized excessive vitality of reality, is inevitably prior—it is the source from which Apollinian order draws, and against which the Apollinian is in a constant state of tension: a “permanent military encampment of the Apollinian” (p. 47).
 
Nietzsche elaborates on the effects of the Dionysian-Apollinian reconciliation on art through the lyricist. The Dionysian artist is caught in the rapture of primal unity, which is produced as music. The Apollinian dream-image then intervenes to transform the music in a symbolic dream image, and “the image that now shows him his identity with the heart of the world is a dream scene that embodies the primordial contradiction and primordial pain, together with the primordial pleasure, of mere appearance” (p. 49). For this reason, and following the dependence of Apollo to Dionysus, music is the sovereign, the prior, and the Apollinian form, image, and concept are secondary: “language cannot adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the hear of the primal unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and prior to all phenomena” (p. 55).
 
The lyricist is swallowed up by the Dionysian in the process, and the lyricist’s “I”—the first-person—does not speak to a specific biographical individual; instead, it is a temporary manifestation, reflecting a multiplicity of first-person projections of the “only truly existent and eternal self resting at the basis of things” (p. 50). And following this Nietzsche makes a provocative suggestion: “we may assume that we are merely images and artistic projections for the true author, and that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art—for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified…” (p. 52). 
 
After establishing this conceptual apparatus, Nietzsche moves to begin his exploration of the origins of Greek tragedy. The origins of Greek tragedy are found in the tragic chorus—the tragedy was once only the chorus. Caught in the power of the chorus, Nietzsche ventures that the Greek spectator felt negated in its overpowering presence, and the effect is a rapprochement of the Dionysian reality and everyday reality and the feeling that “life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable…” (p. 59). After the state of rapture and intoxication, when the everyday returns, Nietzsche writes in a remarkable passage that the result is nausea (one can see how Nietzsche influenced Sartre here). To quote the passage in full: “In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no—true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man” (p. 60). Art intervenes to help the affected live with the nausea of existence as a “saving sorceress, expert at healing” (p. 60). Through art the nauseated overcomes existential pessimism, nihilism.
 
Nietzsche remarks that “for a genuine poet, metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a vicarious image that he actually beholds in place of a concept” (p. 63) and the transformative process of the tragic chorus shares these capabilities with the crowd, who escape their individuality and enter into other characters. Apollo intervenes in the transformative “dramatic” process with an external image and we see now how the Greek tragedy operates: it is the Dionysian chorus that “ever anew discharges itself in an Apollinian world of images” (p. 65), bringing forth the dialogue and the stage.
 
The Apollinian aspect of the Greek tragedy, like the dialogue, may seem “simple, transparent, and beautiful” (p. 67), but the Dionysian foundations remain, as if “luminous spots to cure eyes damaged by gruesome night” (p. 67)—in this way, Nietzsche explicates the concept of “Greek cheerfulness.” He takes the case of Oedipus, whose transgressions against “every law, every natural order… produce a higher magical circle of effects which found a new world on the ruins of the old one that has been overthrown” (p. 68)—this is the cheerfulness of the Dionysian creator, the artist, who breaks apart sacred Apollonian structures and categories. Nietzsche’s analysis identifies the unity of the two energies in Aeschylus’ Prometheus; Prometheus exemplifies the Dionysian by breaking the sacred Olympian laws, while exemplifying the Apollinian in his striving for justice. As Nietzsche summarizes: “All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both” (p. 72).
 
Greek tragedy suffered a premature death at the hands of Euripides and Socrates, who brought on a revaluation of previous values by valorizing conscious and deliberate reason. Euripides and his New Attic Comedy used the stage to reflect everyday life and everyday people, quieting the Dionysian chorus. With this, “the Hellene had given up his belief in immortality; not only his belief in an ideal past, but also his belief in an ideal future”, and Greek cheerfulness transformed into “the cheerfulness of the slave” (p. 78). This shift brought on a new relationship between the artist and the public, the former who created to the tastes of the latter. However, Euripides did not create for the demands of the public, he created for Euripides the critic. With his great critical talent, Euripides the critic sought to intellectually grasp the tradition, to find “something incommensurable in every feature and in every line, a certain deceptive distinctness and at the same time an enigmatic depth, indeed an infinitude, in the background” (p. 80).
 
Yet Euripides was only “a mask” for “an altogether newborn demon, called Socrates” (p. 82). It was Socrates whose aesthetic values overturned the ancient art, whose supreme law reads roughly as follows, “‘To be beautiful everything must be intelligible’” (p. 84). Euripides, following his master, brought his critical facilities and “audacious reasonableness” to the art, measuring “all the separate elements of the drama—language, characters, dramaturgic structure, and choric music—and corrected them according to this principle” (p. 84). It goes without saying that by intellectualizing and reordering the art in such a manner, this overturned the Dionysian foundations of tragedy. In place of Dionysian drunkenness and unconscious, instinctual creation, Euripides became the first sober artist who created consciously: “his aesthetic principle that ‘to be beautiful everything must be conscious’ is… the parallel to the Socratic, ‘to be good everything must be conscious’” (p. 86).  Socrates’ revaluation set in motion towards the antithesis of former values: “instinctive wisdom appears only in order to hinder conscious knowledge occasionally. While in all productive men it is instinct that is the creative-affirmative force, and consciousness acts critically and dissuasively, in Socrates it is instinct that becomes the critic, and consciousness that becomes the creator—truly a monstrosity per defectum!” (p. 88).
 
In the place of the Greek tragedy, Socrates’ preferred art form is the moral Aesopian fables, the prototype of the novel; with Socrates, art and the dialectic come close together for the first time (e.g., Plato’s dialogues). There is an optimistic element in the dialectic that are exemplified in the Socratic maxims: “Virtue is knowledge; man sins only from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy” (p. 91); and the Greek tragedy dies an untimely death.
 
Yet Nietzsche foretells a rebirth of tragedy and art from the ashes of Socratic scientific optimism. Science accelerates with unwavering confidence, striving to understand and overcome existence; and it will eventually collide into the boundary points, into aporia, into Dionysian reality. And “when they see to their horror how logic coils up at these boundaries and finally bites it own tail—suddenly the new form of insight breaks through, tragic insight which, merely to be endured, needs art as a protection and remedy” (p. 98). At the end of his life, even Socrates practiced music while waiting for death in is solitary cell.

​Finally read this classic work; what pushed me to read it was Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, the 3rd part of the book refers to the Poetics and uses Aristotle's language, i.e. recognition and revealing as ethical universal.

Great introduction that contextualizes the Poetics in Aristotle's work, and explains key concepts--the introduction is longer than Aristotle's actual study.

For Aristotle, mimesis/imitation is inherently pleasurable to human beings, so the most important element of tragedy is plot, which is the imitation of an action, with the goal of arousing fear or pity. "The imitation is not just of a complete action, but also of events that evoke fear and pity. These effects occur above all when things come about contrary to expectation but because of one another" (p. 17).

The plot has to be a coherent, spherical (Aristotle doesn't use this word) whole of a certain magnitude, and events must be contained within this whole, so episodic stories are the worst.

Characters cannot be bad, because the audience does not feel pity for bad things that happen to bad people, characters must be admirable but similar to us, so not overly heroic or noble.

Complex plots rely on reversal or recognition or both, while keeping within the logical flow of events in the whole. Good people attempt to make admirable decisions, but their efforts lead unexpectedly to a bad result, because of their ignorance (the state before recognition) that leads to an error, leading to a reversal.

It was only after Aristotle that I began to see the value of plot, the construction of character, and the use of recognition/reversal (recognition is used everywhere). I would always engage in literature, film etc. through a formal and stylistic lens. No wonder I like Hong Sang-Soo so much, his films are formal experimentations with the same plot and characters, and I snicker in cerebral satisfaction watching his playful formal variations.

Aristotle has taught me to value a new way of seeing that is the complete opposite; I wonder what this type of seeing will show me.

​As the excellent introduction by Adam Thirlwell writes, French intellectuals in Paris at the particular historical conjuncture were debating the definitions of left-wing literature by its form and content and readership while leaving intact the 'myth' of Literature as a reified, universal and eternal, bourgeois cultural form. 

Barthes takes the myth of Literature as his object of study, contending that Classical forms of writing (the only form of writing due to a unified bourgeois consciousness in writing) disintegrated in 1850s (due to a French revolution of some sort I suppose, my French history isn't so good), from which the writer confronts an inevitable choice, and "there is no Literature without an Ethics of language" (p.6).

Barthes then goes on to trace the various forms that occurred after the dissolution of classical Literature through Flaubert, Maupassant, Camus etc.

As usual I appreciate Barthes' extraordinary abilities to read (eg. his chapter on 'Writing and the Novel' where he analyzes the role of the preiterate tense and third person narration in creating a sphericity, a 'real' artificiality that sustains the novel as a bourgeois institution).

​Barthes uses the framework of Saussurian linguistics and goes further, adding another stage to analyze the myths of modern society. The final term (sign) in Saussure's structural linguistics becomes the first term (signifier) for Barthes analysis.

The last section of the book, "Myth Today," explains and expands on this methology for analyzing myths, although I thought that his analysis took a forced political dimension in the end, when he writes that myths depoliticize, dehistoricize, and naturalize bourgeois realities. The speech of the proletariat is always political and linked to action, to labour, and is the other end of the spectrum to mythological speech. 

I read in another source that he wrote his analyses after writing the monthly columns analyzing modern myths that make up the bulk of this book. Some of the modern myths he analyzed were quite apolitical, like his article "The World of Wrestling." Perhaps it was the political climate that gave this political bent to his analyses in the end.

As for his actual writings on contemporary mythologies, they were instructive, well-written, and provocative. Some of his references were outdated and outside my particular cultural sphere, but seeing how he methodologically dissects each modern reality to its component linguistic 'terms' was informative and gave me a new frame of reference in seeing the world.

After reading Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, I wanted to learn more about Japanese aesthetics and the inspiration for Kawabata's writing technique.

In Praise of Shadows by renowned Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki elaborates on Japanese aesthetic traditions using the West as a comparison point. The West seeks the brilliance of the Enlightenment, while the Japanese (and the Oriental) finds profundity in the ambiguities in the play between shades and depths.

Tanizaki writes with detail and authority on this subject, passing through a variety of subjects like architecture, food, painting, theatre, and women (and many more in between). 

One of his most interesting insights was the role of tools in colonizing a culture. He laments the loss of the uniquely Japanese path due to the popularization of the Western gadgets and arts. Films and the radio are Western inventions and suit the aesthetic developments of the West, but leaves the Japanese unable to capture their unique tones with these new instruments. What if it was the Orient that invented such gadgets? he wonders.

The whole essay is steeped in nostalgia and the acceptance of inevitable incoming of everything modern in Japanese daily life. Yet there is still a great power in his eulogy of the past, even when written in this tone of active resignation.
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