The Birth of Tragedy

Summary

The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was a twenty-seven-year-old professor at Basel, argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two opposed artistic drives, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian is the drive toward clear form, measure and individuation, whose physiological analogue is the dream, in which every person is a perfect artist of images. The Dionysian is the drive toward ecstatic dissolution of the self, whose analogue is intoxication, whether induced by narcotic drink or by the onset of spring, and whose historical forms include the Bacchic choruses of Greece and the dancing manias of medieval Germany. Drawing on Schopenhauer's distinction between the world as will and as representation, Nietzsche presents the Apollonian as the beautiful illusion that makes life bearable and the Dionysian as a terrifying and ecstatic glimpse of the primordial unity beneath appearances. The Greeks, he argues against the Winckelmann tradition of serene classical Greece, were acutely sensitive to suffering; the folk wisdom of Silenus, that the best thing is never to have been born, lies beneath the radiant Olympian gods, who were created to make existence endurable. Tragedy was born from the dithyrambic chorus of satyrs, servants of Dionysus, onto whose ecstatic vision the Apollonian dialogue and characters were projected. In tragedy the spectator sees the hero destroyed and yet feels a metaphysical comfort: life at bottom is indestructibly powerful and joyful. Only as an aesthetic phenomenon, Nietzsche writes, are existence and the world justified. The middle sections narrate the death of tragedy. Euripides, under the influence of Socrates, brought the ordinary spectator onto the stage, explained everything in prologues, and drove out the Dionysian; tragedy died by suicide. Socrates is the type of the theoretical man, who believes that thought can penetrate the depths of being and even correct it, and whose optimism, culminating in modern science and Alexandrian culture, is hostile to tragic insight. The dying Socrates becomes a new ideal for Greek youth, and opera is condemned as the art form of theoretical, unmusical culture. In the final sections Nietzsche reads Kant and Schopenhauer as having exposed the limits of scientific optimism, and announces a rebirth of tragic culture in German music from Bach and Beethoven to Wagner, whose Tristan und Isolde he analyses as a modern Dionysian work. The book was savagely attacked by the philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and damaged Nietzsche's academic reputation. In the 1886 edition he added an Attempt at Self-Criticism, which calls the book impossible, overwrought and too indebted to Schopenhauer and Wagner, while claiming its two great discoveries: the Dionysian phenomenon and Socrates as a symptom of decadence.

Top Lessons

• Greek serenity was built over an abyss

  Against the image of calm, noble Greeks, Nietzsche argues that their art was a response to unusually acute suffering. The Olympian gods and the clarity of Apollonian form are achievements of a people who knew Silenus's wisdom and needed beauty in order to live.

• Two drives, neither sufficient alone

  The Apollonian without the Dionysian becomes empty form; the Dionysian without the Apollonian becomes unbearable frenzy. Tragedy is the moment when each gives the other shape and depth, and Nietzsche's later work keeps returning to the problem of holding them together.

• The cost of believing knowledge can heal everything

  Socrates is criticised not for reasoning but for the optimistic faith that reason can fathom and correct existence. The book asks whether science, pursued to its limits, must eventually return to art and myth to make life bearable.

• Knowledge that paralyses action

  Section 7 compares the Dionysian man to Hamlet: both have seen too deeply into the nature of things to act, and loathing overtakes them. Art intervenes as a healing enchantress through the sublime and the comic, which make horror and absurdity livable.

• An author who argued with his own book

  The 1886 Attempt at Self-Criticism mocks the book's style and doubts its Wagnerism while defending its core insights. Reading the two together shows a thinker revising rather than abandoning early ideas, and models honest self-critique.

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Medical Lens

The book builds aesthetics on physiology: the Apollonian on dreaming and the Dionysian on intoxication, whether by drink or by spring. It is therefore a key text for the cultural history of altered states and ecstatic religion. Nietzsche treats the medieval St. John's and St. Vitus's dancing manias, which nineteenth-century physicians such as J. F. C. Hecker classed as epidemic nervous disorders, as survivals of Bacchic ritual, and mocks medical observers who see only 'folk-diseases'. The account of post-ecstatic nausea and will-paralysis in section 7 reads like a description of a depressive aftermath and has been compared to the comedown after intoxication, though Nietzsche's frame is metaphysical. The 1886 preface recasts the argument in the vocabulary of symptom, decadence and health that dominates his later work. Nietzsche's own illnesses (migraine, gastric complaints, the dysentery and diphtheria of 1870, and his final collapse, variously attributed to syphilis, a brain tumour or other causes) are often read into his concern with health; such links are biographical interpretations. Freud and Jung both drew on the Apollonian–Dionysian pair.

• Attempt at Self-Criticism, §1

  Nietzsche recalls convalescing from a disease brought home from the war and asks whether Socratism and scientific optimism are symptoms of decline and disease.

• §1

  Dream as the physiological basis of Apollonian art, including the sense that the dream is mere appearance; intoxication by narcotic draught as the basis of Dionysian art; the St. John's and St. Vitus's dancers.

• §2

  Contrast between Greek Dionysian festivals and the sexual licence and cruelty of barbarian orgies, which Nietzsche calls a mixture of lust and cruelty.

• §3

  The wisdom of Silenus, that it is best not to be born and next best to die soon, as the pessimistic ground of Greek art.

• §7

  The lethargic gulf of oblivion after Dionysian ecstasy; return to everyday reality brings nausea and an ascetic, will-paralysing mood; art as a healing enchantress.

• §§13–15

  Socrates' daemon as a warning instinct, the dying Socrates, and the faith that knowledge can heal the eternal wound of existence.