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The Birth of Tragedy



         


The Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872) is a 19th Century work of philosophy by Friedrich Nietzsche. The full title translates as The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music.

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The Book

In this book, Nietzsche, originally educated as a classicist, discusses the history of the Greek tragedy, and introduces an intellectual dichotomy between the Dionysian and the Apollonian (very loosely: wild emotion or sensation vs. calm reason or ideation). Nietzsche claims life has always involved a struggle between these two elements, each battling for control over the existance of man. In Nietzsche's words, "Wherever the Dionysian prevailed, the Apollonian was checked and destroyed...wherever the first Dionysian onslaught was successfully withstood, the authority and majesty of the Delphic god [Apollo] exhibited itself as more rigid and menacing than ever." Yet neither side ever prevails due to each containing the other in an eternal, natural check, or balance.

Nietzsche presents the claim that the tragedy of Ancient Greece was the highest form of art yet created due to their mixture of both Apollonian and Dionysian elements into one seamless whole, allowing the spectator to experience the full spectrum of the human condition. The Dionysiac element was to be found in the music of the chorus, while the Apollonian element was found in the dialogue which gave a concrete symbolism that balanced the Dionysiac revelry. Basically, the Apollonian was able to give form to the abstract Dionysian.

Before the tragedy, there was an era of static, idealized plastic art in the form of sculpture that represented the Apollonian view of the world. The Dionysian element was to be found in the wild revely of festivals and drunkenness, but, most importantly, in music. The combination of these two into one art form gave birth to tragedy.

After the age of Aeschylus and Sophocles, there was an age where tragedy died. Nietzsche ties this to the influence of writers like Euripides and the coming of rationality, represented by Socrates. Euripides much reduced the use of the chorus and was more naturalistic in his representation of human drama, making it more reflective the realities of daily life. Socrates, while as a man was still seen as a beautiful incarnation of the Apollonian spirit, overvalued reason to a point that diffused the value of myth and suffering to human knowledge. By seeing things too clearly, these two intellectuals helped drain the ability of the individual to participate in forms of art. The participation mystique aspect of art and myth was lost, and along with it, much of man's ability to live creatively in optomistic harmony with the sufferings of life.

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Aspects of the Two Poles

Dionysian: self-forgetting, drunkenness, celebration of nature, cruelty, suffering, music, individual dissolved or destroyed, feelings of 'oneness', violation of boundaries, excess, the thing itself, human being as a work of art

Apollonian: arts of space, dreams, principium individuationis (principle of individuation), rules and boundaries, theoretical or elite individual, illusion, optimism, cheerfulness, reason and science, Maya (appearance) celebrated, human being as artist, moderation, rigidity and stasis, exhausting of possibilities

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Reception

The Birth of Tragedy was angrily criticized by many respected professional scholars of Greece. Particularly vehement was philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who denounced Nietzsche's work as slipshod and misleading. Prompted by Nietzsche, Erwin Rohde--a friend who had written a favorable review that sparked the first derogotory debate over the book--responded by exposing Wilamowitz-Moellendorf's inaccurate citations of Nietzsche's work. Richard Wagner also issued a response to Wilamowitz-Moellendorf's critique, but his action only served to characterize Nietzsche as the composer's lackey.

In his denunciation of The Birth of Tragedy , Wilamowitz says:

Herr N. ... is also a professor of classical philology; he treats a series of very important questions of Greek literary history. ... This is what I want to illuminate, and it is easy to prove that here also imaginary genius and impudence in the presentation of his claims stands in direct relation to his ignorance and lack of love of the truth. ... His solution is to belittle the historical-critical method, to scold any aesthetic insight which deviates from his own, and to ascribe a "complete misunderstanding of the study of antiquity" to the age in which philology in Germany, especially through the work of Gottfried Hermann and Karl Lachmann, was raised to an unprecedented height.

In suggesting that the Greeks had problems at all, Nietzsche was departing from the scholarly traditions of his age, which viewed the Greeks as a happy, perhaps even naive, and simple people. The work is a web of professional philology, philosophical insight, and admiration of musical art. As a work in philology, it was almost immediately rejected, and it virtually destroyed Nietzsche's academic career. The music theme was so closely associated with Richard Wagner that it became an embarrassment to Nietzsche once he himself had achieved some distance and independence from Wagner. It stands, then, as Nietzsche's first complete, published philosophical work, one in which a battery of questions are asked, sketchily identified, and questionably answered.

Marianne Cowan, in her introduction to Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, describes the situation in these words:

The Birth of Tragedy presented a view of the Greeks so alien to the spirit of the time and to the ideals of its scholarship that it blighted Nietzsche's entire academic career. It provoked pamphlets and counter-pamphlets attacking him on the grounds of common sense, scholarship and sanity. For a time Nietzsche, then a professor of classical philology at the University of Basle, had no students in his field. His lectures were sabotaged by German philosophy professors who advised their students not to show up for Nietzsche's courses.

By 1886, Nietzsche himself referred to The Birth of Tragedy as "an impossible book . . . badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, [and] without the will to logical cleanliness." Its reception was such a personal disappointment that he referred to it, once, as "falling stillborn from the press." Still, he defended the "arrogant and rhapsodic book" for inspiring "fellow-rhapsodizers" and for luring them on to "new secret paths and dancing places."

The book has been a major influence on Western intellectual life since its initial publication.

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Influence

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Quotes from the Book

From the Walter Kaufman translation:

The joyous necessity of the dream experience has been embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo: Apollo, the god of all plastic energies, is at the same time the soothsaying god, He, who (as the etymology of the name indicates) is the "shining one," the deity of light, is also ruler over the beautiful illusion of the inner world of fantasy. [...] But we must also include in our image of Apollo that delicate boundary which the dream image must not overstep lest it have a pathological effect [...] We must keep in mind the measured restraint, the freedom from the wilder emotions, that calm of the sculptor god. His eye must be "sunlike," as befits his origin; even when it is angry and distempered it is still hallowed by beautiful illusion [...]
[...] Schopenhauer has depicted for us the tremendous terror which seizes man when he is suddenly dumbfounded by the cognitive form of phenomena because the principle of sufficient reason, in some one of its manifestations, seems to suffer an exception. If we add to this terror the blissful ecstasy that wells from the innermost depths of man, indeed of nature, at this collapse of the principium individuationis, we steal a glimpse into the nature of the Dionysian, which is brought home to us most intimately by the analogy of intoxication.
Even under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which songs of all primitive men and peoples speak, or with the potent coming of spring that penetrates all nature with joy, these Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness. In the German Middle Ages, too, singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, whirled themselves from place to place under this same Dionysian impulse. [...] There are some who, from obtuseness or lack of experience, turn away from such phenomena as from "folk-diseases," with contempt of pity born of consciousness of their own "healthy-mindedness." But of course such poor retches have no idea how corpselike and ghostly their so-called "healthy-mindedness" looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers roars past them.


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References

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