The Birth of Tragedy (1872/1967) by Friedrich Nietzsche

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.

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