The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music

by Friedrich Nietzsche

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...