Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy
Penguin Classics Edition, translated by Shaun Whiteside
The Birth of Tragedy is Nietzsche’s first published work. His aim in the text is to explain how the spirit of tragedy, and hence, of philosophical pessimism, emerged from the Homeric spirit of pre-Socratic Greece. The work was not well-received by his colleagues, since it departs quite radically from the dispassionate approach to philology that prevailed at the time Nietzsche was writing. Indeed, Nietzsche himself criticises the work for its Romantic yearnings in an essay appended later in life. Nevertheless, The Birth of Tragedy contains some inventive concepts, and shows the extent to which Schopenhauer’s pessimism had a profound effect on Nietzsche’s thought, even as he was searching for ways to overcome it.
By far the most important idea Nietzsche introduces in The Birth of Tragedy is his distinction between the Apollonian and Dionysian elements in Ancient Greek art and thought. Indeed, this dichotomy (resembling Schopenhauer’s distinction between the world as representation and the world as will) is elevated to something like a grand metaphysical theory in the text, with Nietzsche suggesting that Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies are representative of two opposing elemental forces whose effects permeate all aspects of human life. However, since the text’s theme is aesthetics and not metaphysics, Nietzsche’s focus is on the appearance of those tendencies in Ancient Greek art, and, ultimately, how the interplay between the Apollonian and Dionysian culminated in the sublimity of Greek tragedy.
In brief, Nietzsche considers it significant that the Greeks had two gods of art: Apollo, god of rationality and of dreams, and Dionysus, god of wine and festivals. While the roles of both gods suggest that art for the Greeks was a kind of illusion (albeit, as Nietzsche argues, a life-sustaining one), each embodies, for Nietzsche, a distinct function of artistic creation: the Apollonian represents the human tendency towards the creation of order out of chaos, through which art operates as a mirror of the individual ego, while the Dionysian represents intoxication through art, the dissolution of the individual in the crowd and the bringing together of the audience in a kind of ecstatic trance. The opposition between the two is set up in the text as a kind of dialectic. Thus, each is necessarily opposed to the other, just as each has a necessary function and caters to different needs, and the interplay between the two results, according to Nietzsche, in the spirit of tragedy — a kind of awed acceptance of the terrible and wonderful inexhaustibility of nature, as well as man’s inconsequential place in it. This was a feeling which sustained the Greeks during what Nietzsche sees as the most culturally significant period of Greek history: the era between Homer and Socrates.
Nietzsche then considers how and why this spirit disappeared. What caused the Greeks to turn away from tragedy, and hence from its underlying current of philosophical pessimism, to embrace what Nietzsche sees as a kind of cheerful optimism that persisted throughout the twilight years of Greek civilization? How do we explain this drastic change in the prevailing mood of Greek culture? Nietzsche’s response is highly speculative, and theoretical rather than historical: the Apollonian element in Greek art, Nietzsche claims, came to dominate over the Dionysian. This trend towards the Apollonian in art was mirrored in the appearance of rationalism in philosophy, which Nietzsche attributes to Socrates. According to Nietzsche, instead of assuming that human beings exist in a state of chaos or flux over which we find ourselves relatively powerless, the teaching of Socrates and his followers introduced the thought that it was possible to impose order on the world through rationality, and that, merely by aligning ourselves with reason and living virtuous lives, happiness would be attainable by all.
For Nietzsche, Socrates, as well as the ‘aesthetic Socratism’ of the theatre that appeared in his wake, thus came to embody an Apollonian cheerfulness which has since dominated European culture, up to and including the Nineteenth Century when Nietzsche was writing. The consequence of this apparent victory of Apollo over Dionysus, for Nietzsche, was that Europe had yet to produce anything as significant and as profoundly moving as the tragedies of the pre-Socratic era. In other words, while there is nothing inherently wrong with the Apollonian tendency towards order and rationality (which resulted in the scientific achievements of the Nineteenth Century) in the context of Nietzsche’s theory, without the counterbalance of the Dionysian element in art, a culture trends towards mediocrity.
All is not lost, however. For, as Nietzsche declares in his much-criticised conclusion, Europe was on the verge of seeing a fantastic rebirth of the spirit of Ancient Greek tragedy — in the operas of his friend and mentor Richard Wagner. Later, of course, Nietzsche would repudiate his enthusiasm for Wagner, as well as many of the philosophical ideas in The Birth of Tragedy (which Nietzsche regarded as too deeply rooted in Schopenhauer). Indeed, critics of Nietzsche have regarded these passages as bereft of original ideas and embarrassingly reverential towards Wagner. I am inclined to agree. Nietzsche, in this sense, fails to make his case for a rebirth of tragedy. Nevertheless, The Birth of Tragedy is not strictly a philosophical treatise. It does not put forward straightforward philosophical claims and defend them in a logical or precise manner. Its persuasiveness as an aesthetic theory relies, as Nietzsche later acknowledged, on the reader being swept up in the kind of excitement that Nietzsche experienced as he was writing it. As an argument for a renewed vitality in art, then, it is one which might yet move us. While we may not share the young Nietzsche’s hopes for a romantic resurgence of tragedy, it is possible, if we are willing to listen, for us to perhaps hear echoes of the ancient conflict between Apollo and Dionysus in our own time.
In sum, The Birth of Tragedy is significant for its introduction of the concept of the Apollonian and Dionysian in art, which proves an evocative description of two broadly opposing tendencies in a culture and their seemingly contradictory (yet equally important) functions. Moreover, Nietzsche makes a worthwhile contribution, in his description of the tragic spirit, towards tempering the harsh pessimism of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, while at the same time retaining the flavour and effectiveness of the latter’s highly original aesthetic theory. It is an interesting look, too, into Nietzsche’s early development towards a mature and original philosophy, one with which many of the themes in The Birth of Tragedy would ultimately resonate, even while renouncing the latter’s sentimental excesses.
