Nietzsche on Tragedy

Cambridge Philosophy Classics

by M.S. Silk, J.P. Stern

This is the first comprehensive study of Nietzsche's earliest (and extraordinary) book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872). When he wrote it, Nietzsche was a Greek scholar, a friend and champion of Wagner, and a philosopher in the making. His book has been very influential and widely read, but has always posed great difficulties for readers because of the particular way Nietzsche brings his ancient and modern interests together. The proper appreciation of such a work requires access to ideas that cross the boundaries of conventional specialisms. This is now provided by M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern in their joint study of Nietzsche's book. They examine in detail its content, style and form; its strange genesis and hybrid status; its biographical background and the controversy engendered by its publication; its value as an account of ancient Greek culture and as a theory of tragedy and music; its relation to other theories of tragedy; and its place in the history of German ideas and in Nietzsche's own philosophical career.

Genres: Philosophy, Tragedy

452 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book, given its title, is rather disappointing. Written by a Classics scholar and a German scholar, it lacks the philosophical nuance necessary for engaging with Nietzsche's texts, even his early Birth of Tragedy.

While it does provide an excellent and extensive historical account surrounding the inception, gestation, and publication of this first book, the rest remains summary and surface level interpretation (along with some wrong-headed critique stemming from a lack of understanding).

For example, Silk and Stern appear to fundamentally misunderstand Nietzsche's thought on language and/as metaphor. Despite recognizing that his early work on language marks the entirety of Nietzsche's writings, they fail to understand that language is not simply inadequate to speaking to or saying something that there is - this maintains the same essentialist metaphysics which even early on Nietzsche was seeking to break from. For instead what language exposes for us is the inadequacy of truth as such; said otherwise, that truth would merely be adequation, homoiosis or veritas. What Nietzsche's thought on language exposes is that truth is always already suspended, marked and marking a finite instance of passage and impasse in the carrying out and carrying over of the meta-phora. All of this is passed over by (or passes by) Silk and Stern, and remains but a single, glaring instance of the (philosophical) inadequacy of a book concerning a profoundly philosophical thought and work (another point which the authors attest, only to fail to adequately testify for and bear witness of or to).