The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music

by Friedrich Nietzsche

The very brutality of its simplifications has, no doubt unfairly, led to its fascinating people who are bored or bemused by more cautious works.

Truly, nothing could be more opposed to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world as taught in this book than Christian doctrine, which is only moral, and seeks only to be moral, with its absolute standards: the truth of God, for example, which relegates art, all art, to the realm of falsehood – it denies, condemns and damns it.

But perhaps those same people will find it distasteful to see an aesthetic problem taken so seriously, if they can see art as nothing more than an entertaining irrelevance, an easily dispensable tinkle of bells next to the ‘seriousness of life’: as if no one was aware what this contrast with the ‘seriousness of life’ amounted to. Let these serious people know that I am convinced that art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life in the sense of that man, my noble champion on that path, to whom I dedicate this book.

Understanding kills action, action depends on a veil of illusion -this is what Hamlet teaches us, not the stock interpretation of Hamlet as a John-a-dreams who, from too much reflection, from an excess of possibilities, so to speak, fails to act.

But joy was not all: Euripides taught the people to speak for themselves, as he boasts in his competition with Aeschylus – how he taught the people to observe, to act and to think logically, artfully and with the cleverest sophistries.