The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music

by Friedrich Nietzsche

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...