The Birth of Tragedy

Out of the Spirit of Music

Friedrich Nietzsche

Hellenism, Myth, Tragedy

The late 18th century witnessed a return to the classics as a source of
inspiration and a model for cultural renewal.
Rather than as a nostalgia for an idyllic past, Nietzsche takes up the
myths of Greece as a means through which to critique the present:
the modernity of Germany, 1872.
A critique of decadence.

AESTHETICS:
For Nietzsche, the world seen as an aesthetic
phenomena
The world seen as art.
Nietzsche denies that morality gives sense to existence, and instead
claims that it is only as an aesthetic phenomena that we can justify
existence and interpret the world.
Art, at its greatest, tells the truth and makes it possible to bear it.

TRAGEDY & CARTHESIS

Traditionally, Aristotles Poetics claims that tragedy improves us by
giving us food for thought and by purging us of pity and terror.
The experience of tragedy, according to Nietzsche, is to provide us
with insights into the nature of the real.
Tragedy puts us into closer contact with reality than we normally are.
Chorus

APOLLO & DIONYSUS

APOLLO son of Zeus & Leto

DIONYSUS, son of Zeus & Semele

God of music, prophecy, medicine

Phoebus Apollo, the god of light, the
shining one
The tripod, a symbol of his prophetic
powers

A young god, a still unknown god

Twice born
A nature deity: God of wine,
agriculture, fertility

Pythian Apollo: Delos, Delphi are

sacred to Apollo
Patron of the plastic arts

Associated with mystery religions

(Eleusis): ecstasy, secret rites
God of music

THE APOLLONIAN & THE

DIONYSIAN
Two competing but complementary creative impulses of Greek culture

THE APOLLONIAN

The Beautiful
Appearance of Form ( dialogue of tragedy,
epic poetry, sculpture, painting)

Principle of Individuation
World as representation (visible form)
Finitude, symmetry, borders,
boundaries
Rationality (consciousness)
Moderation, contemplation,
serenity

THE DIONYSIAN
The Sublime
Insights into Nature of Reality
Dissolution of identity
Self-oblivion, lack of limits,
formlessness, primal oneness
Non-representational (music, the chorus of
tragedy)

Excess
Speaks to a darker side of existence &
the confrontation with its pain and
suffering

THE NEED
What is the relation of man to his gods and myths?
How does this change over time?
The same impulse that calls art into existence also created the
Olympian world (the will to life).

What was the tremendous need that produces such a brilliant

society of Olympian beings? (21)

THE NEED
The terrible wisdom of Silenus:
The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born,
not to be, to be nothing. But the second best thing for you is to die soon (22).

The role of art:

*To+ emerge triumphant over a terrible abyss in its contemplation of the
world and its most intense capacity for suffering, by resorting to the most powerful
and pleasurable illusions (24).

THE RECIPROCAL NECESSITY OF THE APOLLONIAN &

THE DIONYSIAN
The Apollonian world of beauty and the terrible wisdom of Silenus:
Torment is necessary so that the individual might create the
redeeming vision (26).
The Greeks entire existence, with all its beauty and moderation, was
based on a veiled substratum of suffering and knowledge, revealed by
the Dionysian (26).
A mutual intensification, from which tragedy is born.
A blending of incommensurables.

THE APOLLONIAN-DIONYSIAN
Provides a metaphysical consolation.
Enchantment is the precondition of all dramatic art : Existence is
intense, rich, triumphant, exuberant, indestructibly powerful & joyful.

Art alone can turn the terror of existence into ideas compatible with
life (40).
This is the sublime: the taming of horror through art.

HAS THE CONTENT OF THE MYTH BECOME

EXHAUSTED?
Aeschylus Prometheus (a Dionysiac mask)
The twilight of the gods.
The first philosophical problem.
The necessity of sacrilege.
It is through tragedy that myth attains its most profound content, its
most expressive form (54).

Euripides & the Role of the Spectator

Euripides brought the spectator on to the stage, whereby it was no
longer a mystery how to represent everyday life (56).
In the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, in every feature, every
line, [Euripides] found something incommensurable, a certain
deceptive precision and at the same time an enigmatic depth, an
infinite background pointing to uncertainty, to something that could
not be illuminated (59).
Nietzsche claims that Euripides abandoned Dionysus and so was
abandoned by Apollo. Why?

THE SOCRATIC INTENTION

To be beautiful everything must first be intelligible

To base tragedy on non-Dionysian precepts.

Now, in order to have any effect at all, it needs new stimuli which
can no longer be found within either of these aesthetic impulses,
neither the Apollonian nor the Dionysian. These stimuli are cool,
paradoxical thoughts rather than Apollonian contemplations, fiery
emotions rather than Dionysiac ecstasies and these thought and
emotions are highly realistic counterfeits (61-2).