The Birth of Tragedy
비극의 탄생
Friedrich Nietzsche's first book, published early in 1872 while he was professor of classical philology at Basel. It argues that Greek tragedy was born from the interplay of the Apollonian drive to form and measure and the Dionysian drive to intoxication and union, and that it died under the rationalism of Socrates and the drama of Euripides. Dedicated to Richard Wagner, it ends by hoping that tragedy would be reborn in his music drama. Scorned by the philologists, it became the starting point of a philosophy that seeks to justify life through art rather than morality.
In depth
Why did a philologist's first book become a classic of philosophy?
The Birth of Tragedy looks like a scholarly study of the origins of Greek drama, but it is really the book in which Nietzsche's whole philosophy first shows itself. Nietzsche became professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland in 1869, at the age of twenty-four, and this was his first book, published before he was thirty. In it he overturned the classicist picture, inherited from Goethe and Schiller, of the ancient Greeks as a serene and harmonious people. The Greeks needed art, he argued, precisely because they felt the horror and transience of life more deeply than anyone.
The opening sentence states the starting point. Nietzsche wrote that aesthetics would gain much once we were certain, not by logical insight alone but by direct intuition, "that the continuing development of art is bound up with the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian."
dass die Fortentwickelung der Kunst an die Duplicität des Apollinischen und des Dionysischen gebunden ist
The two concepts spread so widely that they became everyday vocabulary in literary, art and music criticism. More important to Nietzsche, though, was the question behind them: what makes a life full of suffering bearable? His answer lies in the famous sentence of section 5: "for only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world eternally justified."
denn nur als aesthetisches Phänomen ist das Dasein und die Welt ewig gerechtfertigt
The idea of finding the meaning of life not in God or morality but in artistic creation leads on to the themes of the death of God and the affirmation of life in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. That is why the book became the usual entrance to Nietzsche.
How was it written, and what storm did it raise?
According to the German Wikipedia, the book was assembled in the summer of 1871 from lectures and drafts Nietzsche had been writing since 1869, such as "The Greek Music Drama", "Socrates and Greek Tragedy" and "The Dionysian World View". It appeared early in 1872 from E. W. Fritzsch in Leipzig under the title The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, with a foreword to Richard Wagner signed "Basel, end of the year 1871". Nietzsche was then a frequent guest at Wagner's house at Tribschen near Lucerne and saw Wagner's music drama as the new art that would revive Greek tragedy. Richard and Cosima Wagner were delighted with the book.
The philologists reacted in the opposite way. In May 1872 the young Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, later the leading figure of German classical scholarship, attacked it in a pamphlet titled "Philology of the Future!", a jibe at Wagner's "music of the future". He charged that Nietzsche offered wisdom gained by intuition rather than scholarship, and told him that he might take up the thyrsus and march from India to Greece if he liked, but should step down from the lectern where he was supposed to teach science. Nietzsche's friend Erwin Rohde answered with "Pseudo-Philology" and Wagner defended Nietzsche in an open letter, but the dispute ended without agreement. Nietzsche lost his standing as a philologist and the number of students attending his courses fell sharply. Among artists and intellectuals, on the other hand, the book gradually found readers.
What are the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and why did tragedy die?
Nietzsche draws two artistic drives from two Greek gods. Apollo, god of light and dreams, is the power that divides individuals by clear outlines and shapes beautiful appearances: the principle of the visual arts and epic poetry. Dionysus, god of wine and festivals, is the power that dissolves the boundaries of the individual in intoxication and merges people with one another and with nature: the principle of music. Here Nietzsche borrows from Arthur Schopenhauer. In Schopenhauer's scheme the world divided into individuals is appearance (representation), beneath which lies a single blind will; Apollo corresponds to the principle of individuation, Dionysus to the experience in which that principle is torn apart and one becomes one with the primordial unity. The pair of concepts itself is explained in the separate entry on the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
The Attic tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles was the peak at which the two drives were paired. The chorus of the Dionysian festival revealed the primal suffering of life through music, while the hero's story on stage showed it in Apollonian form, so that the audience could affirm suffering without being crushed by it. Then Euripides reduced the chorus and filled tragedy with ordinary characters and logical speeches, and tragedy declined. Behind him Nietzsche sees Socrates. He sums up Euripides' principle as "everything must be intelligible in order to be beautiful" and calls it "aesthetic Socratism", the counterpart of the Socratic maxim "only the knowing one is virtuous."
alles muss verständig sein, um schön zu sein
For Nietzsche, the "theoretical man" who began with Socrates, the scientific optimism that believes the world can be known to its depths and corrected, killed the wisdom of tragedy. The second half of the book (sections 16–25) argues that this optimism had reached its limits in modern times and closes with the prospect that the German spirit would give birth to tragedy anew in the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer and in Wagner's music.
How did Nietzsche reread the book?
Nietzsche drew away from Wagner around the time of the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876 and later attacked him as an artist of decadence in The Case of Wagner (1888). In 1886 he reissued the book under a new title, The Birth of Tragedy, Or: Hellenism and Pessimism, prefaced by an "Attempt at a Self-Criticism". There he judged harshly his youthful style, his hopes in Wagner and his faith in the German spirit, but he did not withdraw the book's central question: the problem of science cannot be recognised on the ground of science, and must be seen from the perspective of art, and art from the perspective of life.
He looked back on the book as having set a purely artistic interpretation of the world against the moral interpretation of Christianity, the first announcement of a pessimism "beyond good and evil", and wrote that he had given this anti-moral teaching the name of a Greek god: "I called it the Dionysian."
ich hiess sie die dionysische.
Reread this way, The Birth of Tragedy leads to the central opposition of the late Nietzsche, between Dionysus who affirms life and the morality and Christianity that deny it. Twentieth-century reception largely followed this line. Georges Bataille made Dionysian intoxication and transgression an axis of his thought, and Gilles Deleuze, in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), read the tragic and Dionysus as a philosophy of affirmation set against Hegelian dialectics.
How did Marxists read it?
Marxist criticism paid less attention to the book's aesthetics than to its social implications. In section 18 Nietzsche criticises modern "Alexandrian culture", the culture of science and optimism, for needing a slave class in order to survive while denying that need with talk of "the dignity of man" and "the dignity of labour", and he warns: "There is nothing more terrible than a barbaric slave class that has learned to regard its existence as an injustice and is preparing to take revenge, not only for itself but for all generations."
Es giebt nichts Furchtbareres als einen barbarischen Sclavenstand, der seine Existenz als ein Unrecht zu betrachten gelernt hat und sich anschickt, nicht nur für sich, sondern für alle Generationen Rache zu nehmen.
The Paris Commune had taken place in 1871, the year before the book appeared. In The Destruction of Reason (1954) György Lukács cast Nietzsche as the founder of the irrationalism of the imperialist age and argued that his whole philosophy was from the outset an aristocratic defence of culture against socialism and the labour movement. On this reading the anti-Socratism of The Birth of Tragedy, its distrust of reason and science and its praise of myth, becomes a seed of later irrationalist philosophy. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School, by contrast, took Nietzsche seriously as a relentless critic of enlightenment in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where they examined how enlightened reason reverts to myth. The questions the book raised about reason and myth, science and art, thus remained ones on which Marxists divided between rejection and appropriation.