The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music by Friedrich Nietzsche

First published:Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872 (English translation, 1909)

Type of work: Philosophy

The Work:

The 1872 publication of The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, a seminal work by Friedrich Nietzsche, includes the essay “Foreword to Richard Wagner.” In the 1886 edition of the book (Die Geburt der Tragödie: Oder, Griechenthum und Pessimismus; “the birth of tragedy: or, Greek culture and pessimism”) Nietzsche replaced this tribute to the German composer with “Attempt at a Self Critique,” in which he rejects the creative direction of Wagner’s operas.

The two introductory pieces to The Birth of Tragedy, the work’s short title, recapitulate the development of Nietzsche’s thought from an earlier, more romantic understanding of the central conceptual framework he offers in his contrast of the Apollonian and Dionysian categories. The first understanding emphasizes the potential for a new flourishing of tragedy in the arts of Germany, while the second understanding is framed with Nietzsche’s more sober reversal of the values of optimism and pessimism. The spirit of music yields to the spirit of pessimism as the chief agent in the production of art through what Nietzsche terms a “transvaluation” of values.

The Birth of Tragedy itself is structured around an explanation of the rise of literature in Greek culture. The artistic impulse first manifests itself with the invention of the pantheon of Olympic gods, then with the parallel creations of the Apollonian epic and Dionysian lyric verse. These two forms are later united in Greek tragedy, which represents the acme of human thought and expression. This high point, Nietzsche argues, is followed by a decline from the time of Euripides to Socrates. Nietzsche then argues for the primacy of the arts over philosophy as the means for understanding human existence, and he closes with a foreshadowing of the possible rebirth of tragedy in his own contemporary German culture.

Elements of this last argument were soon used and abused by thinkers as well as tyrants, in particular Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, to claim an inherently superior status for German art and culture. Nietzsche, however, offers no such unambiguous nationalist agenda within The Birth of Tragedy; indeed, he explicitly states that the possibility for this union of Apollonian and Dionysian art exists within all cultures.

The Apollonian and the Dionysian offer perhaps the most significant challenges to an Aristotelian reading of Greek tragedy. In The Birth of Tragedy, the Apollonian aspect of creativity deals with image and representation, which Nietzsche terms the “plastic arts.” Nietzsche links the Apollonian with the individual, the rational, and the male, and argues that this force creates a world of dreams. The Dionysian, in sharp contrast, arises from an original oneness of all being that precedes individuation. Nietzsche links it with the state of intoxication and with the female, and argues that this force creates a state of ecstasy. Late in the work, he employs the metaphor contained in the Greek term pharmakos, a word that means both “poison” and “medicine,” to characterize the union between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Dionysian brings with it the knowledge of all human suffering and therefore has the potential to destroy those who can grasp that knowledge, but when the Dionysian is tempered with an Apollonian ordering in images, it becomes its own antidote.

In the work’s opening argument, Nietzsche explains that the Olympian gods function as a metaphor for the great variety of human experience and remain fundamentally amoral. As metaphor, Apollo, god of the plastic arts, rules the dream, and in dreams, all actions have meaning. The dreamer retains a sense of self while fully participating in an alternative reality. This Apollonian arena, Nietzsche asserts, comes purely from Greek culture.

Dionysos, god of music, on the other hand, enters the pantheon from an alien culture, which Nietzsche will later identify as Asian. The rituals for this god erase all sense of self, and thus all sense of rational causality. That force, called Dionysian by Nietzsche, exists in all cultures. He will later parallel the force with the folk culture of all groups. Dionysian intoxication transcends the boundaries between self and other and self and nature, and it even transcends language, replacing it with song and dance. In this Dionysian celebration, the division between artist and artwork is also erased, so that the singer or dancer becomes the work of art. When the two forces unite, the Apollonian becomes the translator for the Dionysian, bringing the ideal balance to human aesthetic expression.

After recounting the story of the encounter between King Midas and Silenos, one of the companions of Dionysos, Nietzsche moves into the background of Greek literature in the epic. In that story, Silenos tells Midas that the best fate a person can hope for would be either nonexistence or a quick death. Against just such wisdom, according to Nietzsche, the early Greeks had created a bulwark of gods. From this defensive bulwark is born the epic. Nietzsche describes Homeric epics as the pinnacle of purely Apollonian art, taking issue with the earlier definition of German author Friedrich Schiller of the epic as naïve. For Nietzsche, the triumph of the epic is the triumph of illusion, and it offers no meaningful response to the profound suffering expressed in the words of Silenos to Midas. To find such a response, Nietzsche returns to the Dionysian force.

Nietzsche then juxtaposes the development of lyric poetry to that of epic poetry, contrasting the lyric poet Archilochos to the epic poet Homer. Whereas the epic functions to defend humanity against the terror of the irrational, the lyric channels the Dionysian by drawing on the traditions of folk song, by combining melody with Apollonian image.

From just such lyric poetry, Nietzsche continues, the chorus of Greek theater is created. He sees the chorus as the sole original actor, and here he makes the significant connection between theater and the religious ceremonies carried out to honor Dionysos. His insight will be confirmed by later scholars, though Nietzsche himself does not attempt to give historical evidence for it. Seen as religious ritual, theater does not allow for distinctions between audience and actors, but rather becomes the site of transformation for all present and brings them into direct contact with the god.

The tragedies of Aeschylos and Sophocles inherit this power of effecting access to the Dionysian through the creation of an Apollonian representation. The suffering of the god Dionysos lies behind the suffering of characters such as Prometheus and Oedipus, and the story of the god’s dismemberment at the hands of the Titans becomes the central metaphor for the fall into individuality from an original Oneness.

Euripides, Nietzsche continues, shows the waning of this union of the Apollonian with the Dionysian, because he drives the onlookers into a critical mode of thinking and reifies their role apart from the play itself. The exception to this can be seen in The Bacchae, which tells the story of Dionysos and his worshipers asserting their power over the ruler Pentheus. In telling the story of Dionysos, Nietzsche suggests, Euripides is forced to confront the Dionysian and recognize its power over the rational.

At this point, Nietzsche turns to Socrates and Plato, implicitly uniting the history of the arts with the history of philosophy, for he considers Socratic dialogue the logical next step in an increasingly fallen Apollonian literature. The Socratic dialogue represents the mistaken notion that reasoning through causality can give the philosopher access to what Nietzsche terms “the ground of Being.” Only a perfectly balanced art, like Greek tragedy, writes Nietzsche, has that power.

Having established the role of music as Dionysian and thus a source of original unity, Nietzsche next addresses the question of whether that spirit of music that led to Greek tragedy in its highest form can reappear. He gives a brief exegesis of the nature of music that stresses its universality and its ability to connect human beings with suffering in a liberating rather than destructive bond. He then examines various kinds of general cultural types and the music they produce. His three categories for culture are Socratic-Alexandrian, artistic-Hellenistic, and tragic-Indian-Brahmanic. The first two cultures will fail to unify the Apollonian and the Dionysian. As an example, Nietzsche discusses the form of opera first produced in Italy. Italy is an Alexandrian culture in Nietzsche’s eyes, and misses both the Apollonian goal of illusion and the Dionysian goal of ecstasy with its fatal invention of recitative. Such a talking style utterly destroys melody and, hence, kills the spirit of music.

Nietzsche does see hope in the early operas of Wagner, which draw on German folk culture and promise to reunite the German people with their original mythology. Nietzsche closes The Birth of Tragedy by reiterating the words of Aeschylos, who had called on his fellow Athenians to sacrifice at the temple of the paired Apollo and Dionysos.

Bibliography

Hayman, Ronald. Nietzsche: A Critical Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Scholars consider Hayman’s book one of the best biographies of Nietzsche. The book also links Nietzsche’s life to his writings.

Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. 4th ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974. Kaufmann was largely responsible for the rehabilitation of Nietzsche’s reputation after his ideas were co-opted by the Nazi Party in Germany to further its own nationalist agenda. Kaufmann also is one of the chief translators of Nietzsche.

Kemal, Selim, Ivan Gaskell, and Daniel W. Conway, eds. Nietzsche, Philosophy, and the Arts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. This collection, working from a British perspective, provides readers with connections between philosophical concepts and literature as well as the other arts.

Magnus, Bernd, Stanley Stewart, and Jean-Pierre Mileur. Nietzsche’s Case: Philosophy as/and Literature. New York: Routledge, 1993. Magnus offers a cogent reading of Nietzsche as a bridge between the fields of philosophy and literature, interpreting Nietzsche’s own writings in literary terms.

Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985. Nehamas is one of the most important contemporary writers on Nietzsche. He brings a rich contextual understanding of the writers who were important to Nietzsche and of Nietzsche’s own works.

Silk, M. S., and J. P Stern. Nietzsche on Tragedy. 1981. Reprint. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Silk and Stern offer an extended reading of the philosopher’s understanding of tragedy. This book places The Birth of Tragedy within the larger body of Nietzsche’s work on tragedy.

Young, Julian. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art. 1992. Reprint. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Young treats the themes of tragedy and pessimism, demonstrating Nietzsche’s argument that the arts balance these two potentially negative forces.