The Birth of Tragedy

211 Pages·2000·11.028 MB·English

by  Friedrich Nietzsche, Douglas Smith (Translator)

OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
The Birth of Tragedy
Translated lPith an Introduction and Notes by
DOUGLAS SMITH
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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CONTENTS
Introduction
VII
Note on the Translation XXXVII
Select Bibliography XXXVlll
A Chronology of Friedrich Nietzsche xli
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY 1
Explanatory Notes 132
Index 165
INTRODUCTION
The Birth of Tragedy is a book about beginnings and endings
the beginning and end of Greek tragedy and the beginning and
end of the decadence of nineteenth-century German culture. It
also marks a beginning and end in Nietzsche's life-the begin
ning of his career as a freelance philosopher and the end of his
career as a professional academic. As befits a work so concerned
with origins, it is a book which in its present form begins not once
but twice, first with the preface to the second edition of 1886,
then with the original dedication to Richard Wagner of 1872.
This double beginning signals the difference between the early
and the late Nietzsche, but also foregrounds one of the major
themes of the book-the ambiguity of dual origins, particularly
with respect to the twin impulses of the Apollonian and the
Dionysian. This ambiguity points in turn to the ambiguity of
the book itself as both a historical study of the origin of Greek
tragedy and a manifesto for the regeneration of contemporary
German culture through music. This introduction will examine
these questions in the course of an exploration of The Birth of
Tragedy in terms of its intellectual and historical contexts, its
argument, and the subsequent development of Nietzsche's ideas
and their legacy to later generations of writers and thinkers.
Contexts
Nietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy in 1872 at the age of
28, three years after being appointed Extraordinary Professor of
Oassical Philology at the University of Basle in Switzerland. It
was his first book and might have been expected to mark the first
major step in an academic career. In fact, it provoked a polemic
which was effectively to end his career as a professional classicist,
partly because of its manifest, and at times overriding, concern
with contemporary rather than ancient culture and philosophy.
VlIl Introduction
This concern was to motivate and inform all of Nietzsche's sub
sequent work, although he would continue to refer to the
examples of classical culture throughout his career. The close
association between The Birth of Tragedy and contemporary pol
itical events is signalled at points in the book by allusions to the
recent Franco-Prussian War of 1870, in which Nietzsche briefly
scrved as medical orderly before contracting dysentery and being
invalided out of the army. In fact, Nietzsche wrote most of the
book while on convalescent leave from the University of Basle in
1871. For the young Nietzsche, the recent military triumph over
France and the subsequent foundation of the German Empire
under Wilhelm I repres<mted an enormous opportunity for the
cultural regeneration of the newly unified nation. For Nietzsche,
as for many of his contemporaries, these hopes were invested in
German music and in the work of the composer Richard Wagner
in particular.
To s)mpathetic contemporary listeners, Wagner's operas
appeared to offer both an innovative musical aesthetics and a
revival of traditional mythical content, elements of progress and
continuity which appealed to a nation and culture in transition.
Both elements-the aesthetics of music and myth-playa crucial
role in The Birth of Tragedy. Pardy as a result of Wagner's theory
and practice, the aesthetics of music occupied a central place in
the European culture of the time. As a non-representational form
of art, music appeared to offer an escape from the confines of
mid-nineteenth-century realism and swiftly became the model art
of the Symbolist movement, its status epitomized by Walter
Pater's celebrated declaration of 1873 that 'all art aspires to the
condition of music' (Studies in the History of the Renaissance).
This music-based aesthetics in many ways marks the beginning
of the 'art for art's sake' movement, with its insistence on the
autonomy of art from outside forces and the primacy of aesthetic
over moral criteria, a sentiment echoed in Nietzsche's repeated
insistence in The Birth of Tragedy that existence can only be
justified as an aesthetic phenomenon (§§ 5, 24). Furthermore, in
more detailed formal terms, the tendency of contemporary music,
and that of Wagner in particular, to move away from harmony
Introduction IX
through chromaticism towards dissonance offered to artists work
ing in other media the example of an art freed from traditional
notions of the beautiful and opened up the possibility of an aes
thetics premised on jarring contrasts of style and content.
The exemplary status ascribed to music received philosophical
justification in the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, together with
Wagner the most important early influence on Nietzsche's work.
For Schopenhauer, music possessed an ontological significance
unlike other more superficial arts, it revealed truths about the
nature of being itself. The key to Schopenhauer's interpretation
of music lies in his elaboration of two notions inherited from
Immanuel Kant-the phenomenon (Erscheinung) and the thing in
itself (Ding an sich). In the en"tique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant
argues that the empirical world available to our senses is merely a
world of phenomena, while the true essence of things, the things
in themselves, remains beyond our perception. In The World as
Will and Representation (18 I 8/ I 844), Schopenhauer retains this
distinction, translating it into his own terms-thus Kant's phe
nomenon becomes Schopenhauer's representation (Vorstellung)
while Kant's thing in itself is identified by Schopenhauer as will
(Wille). So the world as we experience it is a world ofrepresenta
tions, one step removed from the world of the will, which is the
essence of being. If we now relate this to the discussion of art, it is
clear that representational art can only imitate the world we per
ceive and so provide representations of representations, which
are then.so to speak two steps removed from the ultimate reality
of the will. Music, however, since it is a non-representational art,
completely bypasses the world of representation and offers us
direct unmediated access to the will. In philosophical terms, it is
thus by far the most important of the arts. This view of the
philosophical significance of music relative to the other arts
informs the writings of both Wagner and Nietzsche and is essen
tial to an understanding of Nietzsche's view of tragedy, where
Schopenhauer's notions of the phenomenon and of will are
associated with the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses
respectively.
Contemporary developments in music do not provide the sole
x Introduction
aesthetic context for the notions of the Apollonian and the
Dionysian. In spite of the absence of any explicit link, it seems
clear that the opposition between Apollonian and Dionysian
echoes the eighteenth-century distinction between the beautiful
(lias SchOne) and the sublime (das Erhabene), as first proposed by
Edmund Burke in his Philosophical E"'luiry into the Origin ofo ur
Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) and later elaborated
by Kant in the Critique afJudgement (1790). In opposition to the
finite and symmetrical nature of the beautiful, whose experience
elicits pleasure in the viewer, the sublime induces fear through its
lack of limits and recognizable form. This contrast between form
and formlessness constil;Utes one of the keys to the relationship
between the Apollonian and Dionysian as defined by Nietzsche,
and in some respects the Dionysian might even be described as a
radicalized version of the sublime.
Perhaps the most explicit context for Nietzsche's early work,
however, is that of German attitudes to the classical civilizations
of Greece and Rome. Nietzsche was by training and profession a
classicist, but he was just as influenced by the artistic as by the
academic uses to which the classical past was put. In general,
these uses were twofold-either the classical past could be used to
justify and reinforce the present culture by suggesting an identity
and continuity between past and present, or the past could be
used to criticize the present by stressing the difference and dis
tance between them. Something of the former approach can be
seen in the neo-classical architecture of Karl Friedrich Schinkel
which in the early nineteenth century helped to give monumental
form to the growing political power of post-Napoleonic Prussia
and thus to prepare Berlin for its ultimate role as imperial capital
after unification. The Doric revival in architecture, with its
emphasis on the earliest and supposedly purest artistic forms,
coincided with the theories of the classicist Karl Otfried Miiller,
who argued that the Dorians were ethnically different from the
other Greek tribes and were in fact of northern Germanic origin,
thus providing a flattering precedent for the Prussian state. In
contrast to this appropriation of the past for the purposes of
aggrandizing the present, there existed in parallel the literary
Introduction XI
tradition of German Hellenism. From the late eighteenth cen
tury, a distinguished line of German writers began to use the
example of the classical civilization of Greece not only as a source
of literary inspiration but also as a model for cultural renewal.
Such writing often took the form of a critique of the deficiencies
of contemporary culture when compared with the accomplish
ments of the past. This use of the classical past to criticize the
present is an important element in the work of such diverse
writers as Winckelmann, Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin, and Heine,
and represents an important attempt to counter the official use of
the past to justify the present. In the poetry of Holderlin, for
example, the project of mapping Greek culture onto German
culture takes the form of a linguistic and topographical
displacement-the German language is forced into Greek verse
forms, while the geography of Germany is reconfigured as Greek
landscape. In the process, the identity of German culture is
estranged from itself and brought into question rather than sim
ply confirmed by past precedent. Elements of both of these con
trasting attitudes to the classical tradition exist in Nietzsche's
early work-as in Miiller, there is a strong suggestion of a special
and exclusive relationship between German and Greek culture,
but at the same time, the Greek example is used to criticize the
low level of contemporary German achievement. Nietzsche's
ambivalence to the critical tradition of German Hellenism sur
faces also in his view of the presentation of Greek culture to be
found in writers such as Winckelmann and Schiller.
In writing of Greek culture, the German Hellenists tended to
present Greece as an idyllic lost world of innocence and harmony
standing in stark contrast to the conflict and self-{;onsciousness of
modern life. So, for Winckelmann in his Reflections on the Imita
tion of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755), Greek art
was characterized above all by 'noble simplicity and quiet grand
eur' (edle Einfalt und stille GriifJe). In a similar vein, Schiller in his
On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795) distinguished between
the free and spontaneous (naIve) creativity of the Greeks and the
problematic and self-{;onscious (sentimental) sensibility of the
modern artist. Both writers thus contributed to the creation of