The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music

by Friedrich Nietzsche

Afterphilologie!, a difficult word to translate: it means, roughly, ‘Pseudo-Philology’, but After is also the German for ‘arse’, and there is a long tradition, not perhaps altogether unexpectedly stemming from Luther, of using the word in both senses simultaneously.

As we shall see, when he came to write his ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’ in 1886, Nietzsche was far harsher on the book than any of his academic critics had been, their grounds for disapproval being only one element in the many-pronged critique he directs against the work. So what we now have is a bewildering whole, if we see it as that: the main body of the book is angrily denounced in the ‘Attempt’, at the same time as he tries to perform a rescue operation, claiming that in certain respects ‘this impossible book’ contains insights which he muddied by introducing jarring and incongruous elements, but which show that in certain crucial respects he was already on the main path of his life’s work. It is, of course, a familiar tactic with authors looking with mixed feelings on their earliest productions, but in this case, more than usually, it presents questions about the nature of self-interpretation and development. What I shall do, in the first place, is to concentrate on the first edition, since that presents quite enough problems in itself, and then go on to deal with aspects of the ‘Attempt’ which are genuinely enlightening about what Nietzsche originally said, as opposed to what he later wished that he had said.

What kind of book is BT? That turns out to be so hard to answer

The shortest answer is that, for all its brevity, it is a work which is attempting to do many things more or less simultaneously.

Nietzsche has three major concerns (at least) going in tandem: a political-cultural one, a claim to be worked out about the nature of metaphysics, and a consideration of a specific phenomenon in the history of art.

what marks off BT as sharply different from (almost) everything that he wrote afterwards is its initially conventional mode of presentation, that of the academic essay.

The forces which were operating on him when he wrote the book were powerful and various enough for it to be a foregone conclusion that the result would be a weird hybrid. Like most people with a set of very strong passions, and a powerful urge to communicate them, he was convinced that they were intimately connected, that they proceeded from a central core of concern which the writing of a book would locate for his readers, and also for himself.

All his books, as he later came to insist, were reflections of his personal history – but then so are everyone’s, he claimed: it was just that he was perspicacious and honest enough to realize a truth which almost all scholars, and especially philosophers, officially engaged in the disinterested pursuit of universal truths, insisted on denying. But when he wrote BT he was still a paid-up member of the club, so he presents his interests and views as ones which should be shared and accepted by his whole culture.

His training as a classical scholar engendered a profound love of Greek literature, equally of Homer and of the great tragedians of the fifth century BC, as well as a lifelong fascination with the philosophers, especially the pre-Socratics.

He rapidly developed into a disciple, and since Schopenhauer’s pessimistic world-view claimed validity independently of time or place, it was necessary to understand the Greeks in his terms.

‘I offer all my other human relationships cheap; but at no price would I relinquish from my life the Tribschen days, those days of mutual confidences, of cheerfulness, of sublime incidents – of profound moments… I do not know what others may have experienced with Wagner: over our sky no cloud ever passed.’ What he felt he had found in Wagner – and what he later vehemently denied was there to be found – was a reincarnation of the genius of Greek tragedy, combined with a deeply felt comprehension of Schopenhauer.

This, too, is a matter of more than scholarly concern. This highly peculiar book is thought by some to be a fascinating, original study which becomes polluted by Nietzsche’s fanatical zeal for the Wagnerian cause from §16 to the end. A distinguished previous translator, Walter Kaufmann, has a note at the end of §15: ‘The book might well end at this point – as the original did… The discussion of the birth and death of tragedy is finished in the main, and the following celebration of the rebirth of tragedy weakens the book and was shortly regretted by Nietzsche himself.’ That is written from the standpoint of someone who not only had no interest in Wagner, the man or his work, but who wished that Nietzsche never had had either.

he was concerned to change the world, and held unswervingly the view that the health of a culture was to be estimated in terms of the art it produced.

the shift in tone is inevitable: having given his account of the rise and fall of Greek tragedy, and the underlying reasons for it, he now has to explain to his audience how the rebirth is at hand, against all the odds. So the enterprise does become extended, and it is clear that Nietzsche is at something of a loss as to how to proceed.

The fact is that it must have become apparent to him at this point that his enthusiasms didn’t fit together as comfortably as he had up to this stage been assuming, so he had to indulge in a mixture of analysis and rhetoric to create an impression of unity. The unity of intent on his part was there all along. But what he felt as a single complex of forces turned out to be recalcitrant to a discursive account.

For what he congratulates himself for in the ‘Attempt’ is the formula which appears twice, slightly differently, in the body of the text: ‘Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world justified.’ He has been criticized for introducing that formula without leading up to it in a logically impeccable way, but the point is that the whole work is suffused by that idea; that is its vision, and it wouldn’t matter where it occurred, since it underpins everything that he has to say. It can be seen, in the first place and most lucidly, as an attack on the dominant account of tragedy which is the inheritance of Aristotle. In that tradition, tragedy improves us, both by giving us food for thought about such matters as hubris, and also, and most famously, by purging us of pity and terror, or through them. The world is interpreted in moral categories, and we see what to avoid and what to embrace. It is consonant with this view that Aristotle should have seen Euripides as ‘the most tragic of the poets’, and Aeschylus as the least, with Sophocles occupying a middle position. Nietzsche reverses the order: Aeschylus is the greatest, and Euripides is the agent of tragedy’s ‘suicide’, to quote Nietzsche’s lurid term. The lack, in BT, of almost any analysis of specific tragedies makes this assessment bewildering. Nietzsche seems to be standing so far back from the realities of Greek drama that it is only in the vaguest way that one can see why he should select as his hero someone...

the chorus plays a much larger part in Aeschylus than in his successors. And third, and partly as a result of that fact, individual psychology is recessive in the Oresteia, ‘ myth’ taking precedence. It is in the contrast between ‘myth’ and ‘psychology’, though Nietzsche doesn’t spell it out quite like that, that he sees the crucial difference between genuine tragedy and its counterfeit.

Myth re-enacts for us a story we all know, and in tragedy it does it in musical terms, though there is the problem, which Nietzsche later addresses, of what Greek music was like, since it is something of which we have little knowledge. But by affecting us at a level at which only music can, it enables us to come to an apprehension of the nature of what we are witnessing, which is, finally to introduce the most famous term of BT, Dionysiac. And once we begin to grasp the force of that term, and what it denotes, for Nietzsche, together with its complementary ‘Apolline’, we can begin to follow, if not to accept, his overall strategy, and see that he had ruthlessly to manipulate the material he was writing about in order to create his own meta-tragedy – a tragic story, but not a tragedy, since he hadn’t sung it.

In crudest outline, and not following exactly the course of Nietzsche’s wavery narrative: the Dionysiac and Apolline are in the first place forces, or categories in a metaphysical sense. In a way they are opposites, and Nietzsche, who was both attracted to dichotomies and intent on overcoming them

does not regard them as mutually hostile, as many commentators think. They could not be, as soon as one sees what they actually come to. For the Dionysiac pertains to the nature of reality, while the Apolline is connected with modes of its appearance. Here Nietzsche is indulging in fully fledged metaphysics,

So he means us to get a general idea of what he is talking about, but without pressing him for details, which he certainly doesn’t provide.

Nietzsche takes as needing explanation -an account of what makes it possible – is that of tragic pleasure. In other words, he is concerned with the question which has traditionally been posed as to why we enjoy portrayals of suffering on an enormous scale.

There is, he thinks (in BT and for a short time afterwards), something so striking about the difference between the pleasure we gain from the visual arts and epic poetry, on the one hand, and that which is vouchsafed us by music and tragic drama (which is properly speaking only that which is set to music) on the other, that we are forced to give an account of the fundamentally different drives which animate them. It is in this way that he comes to postulate the existence of the Apolline and the Dionysiac.

The pleasure of epic poetry or sculpture is to be accounted for by invoking our delight in appearances, especially if they partake of the lucidity of dreams. Everything in them has maximum individuality, the hardest edges. It is therefore illusory, since as Nietzsche has said, reality is one and indivisible. But during the pre-tragic age of the Greeks, when Homer told them the tales they needed to hear, they were consoled by being presented with a world which had separate heroes undergoing ordeals which were justified by the pleasure that the gods derived from watching them. Life may have felt tragic for men, but it was a divine comedy; and the grandeur of the Greek heroes is shown by their lack of resentment at being the entertainment of the gods. Fine as all that may have been, it was based on the postulation of a set of myths, in all senses of the word. What happened when epic was replaced by tragedy was that the principle of individuation (Schopenhauer’s term, taken over for occasional use by Nietzsche) gave way to the chorus, apparent individuals submerging their identities in the mass. This is only possible under various unusual conditions – anyone used to academic surroundings will think immediately of rugger club dinners, an old Nazi will think nostalgically of torchlight processions in Nuremberg, and a member of a choral society of singing the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. These are all relevant to the state that Nietzsche describes, using the German Rausc...

But he points out that, even when apprised of this dire wisdom, the Greeks, far from wanting to die, embraced life even more enthusiastically than before. How did they manage such a feat, and why, in any case, is it to be counted as a feat, as opposed to the absurdity of continuing with an existence which one knows can only be painful? The answer comes, as we have already seen, in two stages. First, the Greeks of Homer’s time lived in order to entertain the gods: ‘The same impulse that calls [Apolline] art into existence, the complement and apotheosis of existence, also created the Olympian world with which the Hellenic “will” held up a transfiguring mirror to itself.’ Because the gods enjoy the spectacle of men suffering so much, noble men are eager to oblige: ‘We might now reverse Silenus’ wisdom to say of [the heroic Greeks]: “the worst thing of all for them would be to die soon, the second worst to die at all.”’ And Nietzsche immediately goes on to cite Achilles’ lament over the brevity of existence.

‘The more aware I become of those omnipotent art impulses in nature, and find in them an ardent longing for illusion, and for redemption by illusion, the more I feel compelled to make the metaphysical assumption that the truly existent, the primal Oneness, eternally suffering and contradictory, also needs the delightful vision, the pleasurable illusion for its constant redemption.’

To be a pessimist in the conventional sense is not only cowardly but futile: there is no escaping the eternal agonizing drama of existence, so one exults in it, by ceasing, if only temporarily, to be one. If one attempts, as all philosophers have, even Schopenhauer, to give a moral justification of existence, the failure of the attempt will be embarrassingly evident, and refuge will have to be taken in ever-wilder imaginings to redeem our sufferings, which are inevitable and incurable. The moralist’s plans for improving the lot of mankind by remedial action are like pissing in the sea. If one were to contrive simultaneously to preach a morality and to look unflinchingly at what the world is actually like, despair would be the only outcome.

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. Not reflection, not that! – True understanding, insight into the terrible truth, outweighs every motive for action, for Hamlet and Dionysiac man alike. No solace will be of any use from now on, longing passes over the world towards death, beyond the gods themselves; existence, radiantly reflected in the gods or in an immortal ‘Beyond’, is denied. Aware of truth from a single glimpse of it, all man can now see is the horror and absurdity of existence; now he understands the symbolism of Ophelia’s fate, now he understands the wisdom of Silenus, the god of the woods: it repels him. Here, in this supreme menace to the will, there approaches a redeeming, healing enchantress – art. She alone can turn these thoughts of repulsion at the horror and absurdity of existence into ideas compatible with life: these are the sublime - the taming of horror through art; and comedy - the artistic release from the repellence of the absurd. The satyr chorus of the dithyramb is the salvation of Greek art; the frenzies described above were exhausted in the middle world of these Dionysiac elements.

All art comes to us in some form or other, just as all experience is categorized ready for our consumption.

Dionysus, as Nietzsche puts it in §21, speaks with the voice of Apollo, and finally Apollo speaks with the voice of Dionysus. In the end the deities, if we wish to see them as that, are collaborative when we achieve the full tragic experience. But Apollo is only present to the extent that he has to be. Tragedy, at its highest, is almost unendurable.

So strong men are needed not only to provide, but also to enjoy tragedy. The period during which they were able to turned out to be lamentably brief, though Nietzsche seems to think that that was due to misfortune rather than any historical necessity. What happened was that the third of the three Greek tragedians killed it by the production of works in which, though few have realized it, knowledge (Wissenschaft) was preferred to wisdom (Weisheit). This is signalized in Euripides’ plays (for he is the villain) by the comparative insignificance of the chorus, and the multiplication of individual characters who think that they can resolve their conflicts by argument, or as Nietzsche puts it, dialectic. As soon as one puts one’s faith in reason and reasoning, as opposed to intuition mediated through music, one has forfeited the possibility of genuine knowledge, which must always be tragic.

the climax of BT comes in §§11-15 of the book, where Nietzsche produces his account of how Socratism, a recurring phenomenon which has its purest expression in the figure after whom it is named, destroyed tragedy and set up the millennia-long belief in progress through reason, the monstrous equivalence of the true, the good and the beautiful, and the possibility of a total understanding and thus control of the world and of our own destinies.

For Nietzsche, every great positive manifestation of what is most valuable for human beings has a shady or at least inferior simulacrum. If the simulacrum is understood properly, it may be harmless or even indispensable. Thus in our ordinary waking state there is no doubt that reason and reasoning are valuable activities. But they pertain to the world of illusion, or appearance, and are powerless to instruct us as to the nature of the real. Aesthetic Socratism, Nietzsche’s arch-foe at this first stage of his thinking, takes the opposite viewpoint; and the calamitous artistic result is that we have works in which we are fobbed off with pseudo-profundity, as can be seen from the inveterately optimistic attitude that they perpetrate.