The Birth of Tragedy
1
To be fair to The Birth of Tragedy (1872), one has to forget a few things. Its effect and fascination were due to what was wrong with it—its practical application to Wagnerism, as if that were a symptom of ascent. In this respect, this essay was an event in the life of Wagner: it was only from that moment on that Wagner’s name elicited high hopes. People still remind me of this today, sometimes even in the context of Parsifal—how I am the one who has it on his conscience that such a high opinion of the cultural value of this movement gained prevalence.
Several times I saw this book cited as “The Re-Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music”: what people had ears for was only a new formula for the art, the intentions, the task of Wagner—and what was really valuable in the essay was ignored. “Hellenism and Pessimism” would have been a less ambiguous title—suggesting the first instruction about how the Greeks got over their pessimism, how they overcame it.
Precisely their tragedies prove that the Greeks were not pessimists: Schopenhauer went wrong at this point, as he went wrong everywhere.
Taken up with some degree of neutrality, The Birth of Tragedy looks quite untimely: one would never dream that it was begun amid the thunder of the battle of Worth. Before the walls of Metz, in cold September nights, while on duty as a medical orderly, I thought through these problems. One might sooner believe that the essay was fifty years older.1 It is indifferent toward politics—“un-German,” to use the language of the present time—it smells offensively Hegelian, and the cadaverous perfume of Schopenhauer sticks only to a few formulas. An “idea”2—the antithesis3 of the Dionysian and the Apollinian—translated into the realm of metaphysics; history itself as the development of this “idea;” in tragedy this antithesis is sublimated4 into a unity; and in this perspective things that had never before faced each other are suddenly juxtaposed, used to illuminate each other, and comprehended5—opera, for example, and the revolution.
The two decisive innovations of the book are, first, its understanding of the Dionysian phenomenon among the Greeks: for the first time, a psychological analysis of this phenomenon is offered, and it is considered as one root of the whole of Greek art. Secondly, there is the understanding of Socratism: Socrates is recognized for the first time as an instrument of Greek disintegration, as a typical decadent. “Rationality” against instinct. “Rationality” at any price as a dangerous force that undermines life.6
Profound, hostile silence about Christianity throughout the book. That is neither Apollinian nor Dionysian; it negates all aesthetic values—the only values recognized in The Birth of Tragedy: it is nihilistic in the most profound sense, while in the Dionysian symbol the ultimate limit of affirmation is attained. There is one allusion to Christian priests as a “vicious kind of dwarfs” who are “subterranean.”7
2
This beginning is exceedingly strange. I had discovered the only parable and parallel in history for my own inmost experience —and thus became the first to comprehend the wonderful phenomenon of the Dionysian. At the same time my discovery that Socrates was a decadent proved unequivocally how little the sureness of my psychological grasp would be endangered by any moral idiosyncrasy: seeing morality itself as a symptom of decadence is an innovation and a singularity of the first rank in the history of knowledge. How high had I jumped with these two insights above the wretched and shallow chatter about optimism versus pessimism!
I was the first to see1 the real opposition: the degenerating instinct that turns against life with subterranean vengefulness (Christianity, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, in a certain sense already the philosophy of Plato, and all of idealism as typical forms) versus a formula for the highest affirmation, born of fullness, of overfull-ness, a Yes-saying without reservation, even to suffering, even to guilt, even to everything that is questionable and strange in existence.
This ultimate, most joyous, most wantonly extravagant Yes to life represents not only the highest insight but also the deepest, that which is most strictly confirmed and born out by truth and science. Nothing in existence may be subtracted, nothing is dispensable—those aspects of existence which Christians and other nihilists repudiate are actually on an infinitely higher level in the order of rank among values than that which the instinct of decadence could approve and call good.2 To comprehend this requires courage and, as a condition of that, an excess of strength: for precisely as far as courage may venture forward, precisely according to that measure of strength one approaches the truth. Knowledge, saying Yes to reality, is just as necessary for the strong as cowardice and the flight from reality—as the “ideal” is for the weak, who are inspired by weakness.
They are not free to know: the decadents need the lie—it is one of the conditions of their preservation.
Whoever does not merely comprehend the word “Dionysian” but comprehends himself in the word “Dionysian” needs no refutation of Plato or Christianity or Schopenhauer—he smells the decay.
3
How I had thus found the concept of the “tragic” and at long last knowledge of the psychology of tragedy, I have explained most recently in Twilight of the Idols:1
“Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems; the will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibility even in the very sacrifice of its highest types—that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I understood as2 the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to get rid of terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous affect by its vehement discharge—Aristotle misunderstood3 it that way—but in order to be oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity—that joy which includes even joy in destroying.”
In this sense I have the right to understand myself as the first tragic philosopher—that is, the most extreme opposite and antipode of a pessimistic philosopher. Before me this transposition of the Dionysian into a philosophical pathos did not exist: tragic wisdom was lacking; I have looked in vain for signs of it even among the great Greeks in philosophy, those of the two centuries before Socrates.4 I retained some doubt in the case of Hera*us, in whose proximity I feel altogether warmer and better than anywhere else. The affirmation of passing away and destroying, which is the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy; saying Yes to opposition and war; becoming, along with a radical repudiation of the very concept of being—all this is clearly more closely related to me than anything else thought to date. The doctrine of the “eternal recurrence,” that is, of the unconditional and infinitely repeated circular course of all things—this doctrine of Zarathustra might in the end have been taught already by Hera*us. At least the Stoa has traces of it, and the Stoics inherited almost all of their principal notions from Hera*us.
4
A tremendous hope speaks out of this essay. In the end I lack all reason to renounce the hope for a Dionysian future of music. Let us look ahead a century; let us suppose that my attempt to assassinate two millennia of antinature and desecration of man were to succeed. That new party of life which would tackle the greatest of all tasks, the attempt to raise humanity higher, including the relentless destruction of everything that was degenerating and parasitical, would again make possible that excess of life on earth from which the Dionysian state, too, would have to awaken again. I promise a tragic age: the highest art in saying Yes to life, tragedy, will be reborn when humanity has weathered the consciousness of the hardest but most necessary wars without suffering from it.
A psychologist might still add that what I heard as a young man listening to Wagnerian music really had nothing to do with Wagner; that when I described Dionysian music I described what I had heard—that instinctively I had to transpose and transfigure everything into the new spirit that I carried in me. The proof of that, as strong as any proof can be, is my essay on Wagner in Bayreuth: in all psychologically decisive places I alone am discussed—and one need not hesitate to put down my name or the word “Zarathustra” where the text has the word “Wagner.” The entire picture of the dithyrambic artist is a picture of the pre-existent poet of Zarathustra, sketched with abysmal profundity and without touching even for a moment the Wagnerian reality. Wagner himself had some notion of that; he did not recognize himself in this essay.
Similarly, “the idea of Bayreuth” was transformed into something that should not puzzle those who know my Zarathustra: into that great noon at which the most elect consecrate themselves for the greatest of all tasks. Who could say? The vision of a feast that I shall yet live to see.
The pathos of the first pages is world-historical; the glance spoken of on the seventh page is Zarathustra’s distinctive glance; Wagner, Bayreuth, the whole wretched German pettiness are a cloud in which an infinite mirage of the future is reflected. Even psychologically all decisive traits of my own nature are projected into Wagner’s—the close proximity of the brightest and the most calamitous forces, the will to power as no man ever possessed it,5 the ruthless courage in matters of the spirit, the unlimited power to learn without damage to the will to act. Everything in this essay points to the future: the impending return of the Greek spirit, the necessity of counter-Alexanders who will retie the Gordian knot of Greek culture.
Listen to the world-historical accent with which the concept of the tragic attitude is introduced at the end of section 4: this essay is full of world-historical accents. This is the strangest “objectivity” possible: the absolute certainty about what I am was projected on some accidental reality—the truth about me spoke from some gruesome depth. At the beginning of section 9 the style of Zarathustra is described with incisive certainty and anticipated; and no more magnificent expression could be found for the event of Zarathustra, the act of a tremendous purification and consecration of humanity, than was found in section 6.6
1That would take us back to the time of Hegel, 1820.
2Idee: one of the key terms of Hegel’s philosophy.
3Gegensatz: the word Hegel generally uses where English translations have “antithesis.”
4Aufgehoben: a term Hegel liked especially because in ordinary German it can mean canceled, preserved, and lifted up. For this whole passage, cf. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, Chapter 13, section I, including note 7.
5Begriffen: another term Hegel used frequently.
6For a comprehensive discussion of Nietzsche’s complex attitude toward Socrates and its development from The Birth of Tragedy to Ecce Homo, see Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, Chapter 13.
7At the end of section 24. But the quotation is inexact, and the interpretation—that priests were meant—is questionable.
1Except for the context, this could well mean: First I saw …
2Gutheissen, gut heissen.
1In the final section of the book (Portable Nietzsche.).
2In Twilight: guessed to be.
3In Twilight: understood. Nietzsche is referring to Aristotle’s conception of catharsis (Poetics 6, 1449b).
4Nietzsche’s extremely high valuation of the pre-Socratics was taken up by Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger.
5This striking confession of the philosopher of the will to power has been ignored although, quite apart from its human and psychological interest, it helps to illuminate his conception of the will to power.
6All these references are to Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, and that is the book discussed in the last four paragraphs of this section. Nietzsche, as usual, furnishes page references—which Karl Schlechta, in his edition of the works, misconstrues as referring to The Birth of Tragedy: whoever looks up Schlechta’s page references won’t find any of the passages discussed by Nietzsche.