The Birth of Tragedy

The Birth of Tragedy
Synopsis

The Birth of Tragedy or Hellenism and Pessimism
Friedrich Nietzsche  
(Tr. Sp.-Eng. from a review in Shvoong)

 It is the first work with which the German thinker was presented to the public in 1872. You can see latent all of his subsequent writings in it.

  Art, says Nietzsche, is linked to the duplicity of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian term refers the aesthetic contemplation of a world imagined and dreamed, of a world of near-perfect appearance from that point of view, as liberation from events; in the name of Dionysus, on the other hand, evolution is understood as passionate creator strength, who, at the same time, feels the fury of the destroyer, i.e. a god that creates and destroys at the same time.

  Both trends are artistic instincts, of the same nature, and for the fight of both Greek art was developed. For the Greek, becoming Apollonian meant to dominate the self-will of the monstrous, of the unknown, of atrocity, and transform it into a will of measure. In the Greek's depths lives, latent, excess, the Asian; the Greek's courage consists of the fight against his Asianism. So the olympic theogony of joy developed by slow transformation of the titanic theogony of terror, by virtue of the Apollonian beauty instinct. In the midst of serene light germinate plastic arts and epic, which are pure contemplation, and therefore controlled and cold, of images which imitate, with their language, the world of vision.

  In contrast to these contemplative arts, music appears as will displayed as art of drunkenness; while in tragedy, to the Dionysian artist, by effect of the Apollonian dream, is revealed his orgiastic state in an allegorical dreaming image. Tragedy has been born of the tragic chorus, composed of satyrs, which represent the Dionysian element itself.

  The satyr is the original image of the drunk man by the god's proximity; it is symbol of an existence deeper than that of the man of culture, and represents, with his Dionysian experience, the real truth in comparison with the phenomenon that happens; hence it is born the metaphysical consolation of tragedy, in the sense of being's eternity above the continuous death of appearances. First Dionysus, the god, is the only one represented in the orgiastic commotion; then it comes the attempt to represent him in visions, and thus actual drama is born, which, transforming into beauty the hero's sufferings, produces serenity.

  Until Euripides, Dionysus is the only scenic hero, under the costumes of the various characters of the different tragedies.

  But the germ solvent of tragedy is Euripides' Socratism, the predecessor of the new attic comedy, the one who led to scene, not the hero, the man transfigured by the Dionysian passion of the choir, which contemplates in him the sufferings of the god, but the homunculus, in the individuality of a daily suffering.

  The law of the aesthetic Socratism is that everything must be intelligible to be beautiful; Euripides and Socrates, his master, find repugnant, in a sense, excess in drama, indeterminacy and the Dionysian pomp of tragedy.

  Socrates, the theoretical man, only believes in the ability of intellect, which, with dialectics as a tool, he thinks able to get to the roots of Being.

This sort of theoretical optimism, penetrating into the body of tragedy, undermines its bases by rejecting the Dionysian element. Henceforth, Nietzsche takes the problem of Greece, seized with the decadent theoretical optimism, and moves it to Germany, scorned by the same spirit.

 He will say that if Kant and especially Schopenhauer, with their doctrines of things in themselves and universal pain, by a kind of tragic knowledge, have won the first battles against that form of low scientificism, it shall concern Wagnerian drama the effort to cure the German people of misguidance, whose ultimate expression in art is the decadent musical drama with idyllic background.

  The two major innovations of the book are: firstly, the understanding of the Dionysian drama among the Greeks against the myth, later assumed by Winckelmann and, in more recent times also adopted by Hegel, that the Greeks were a happy people of balanced youth; secondly, the interpretation by which Socrates is considered an instrument of the Greek dissolution and drawn for the first time as a typical decadent.

  It is also introduced as a basis of the work the principle of the supreme affirmation that accepts whatever exists without moral arguments, which always agrees, pleases, proud, to life; hence the hostility to any culture that wants at all costs rationality and the tacit aversion to Christianity which relegates all art to a secondary role, in gift to morals.

  Later, Nietzsche, disapproved of this book having contaminated the aesthetic problem of the Greek world, putting it in direct relation with modern German art and especially with Wagner's music; Nietzsche will precisely compare himself with a barbaric drunkard, who dreams at the foot of a statue of Venus.

  And it is noticeable that Nietzsche had not yet risen to the complete affirmation of his own brilliant intellect; the style, resenting certain romanticism, is not still the beautiful Nietzschean style of his higher philosophical work period.