The Birth of Tragedy

Is it not possible that by calling to our aid the musical relation of dissonance, the difficult problem of tragic effect may have meanwhile been materially facilitated? For we now understand what it means to wish to view tragedy and at the same time to have a longing beyond the viewing: a frame of mind, which, as regards the artistically employed dissonance, we should simply have to characterise by saying that we desire to hear and at the same time have a longing beyond the hearing. That striving for the infinite, the pinion-flapping of longing, accompanying the highest delight in the clearly-perceived reality, remind one that in both states we have to recognise a Dionysian phenomenon, which again and again reveals to us anew the playful up-building and demolishing of the world of individuals as the efflux of a primitive delight, in like manner as when Heraclitus the Obscure compares the world-building power to a playing child which places stones here and there and builds sandhills only to overthrow them again.

Hence, in order to form a true estimate of the Dionysian capacity of a people, it would seem that we must think not only of their music, but just as much of their tragic myth, the second witness of this capacity. Considering this most intimate relationship between music and myth, we may now in like manner suppose that a degeneration and depravation of the one involves a deterioration of the other: if it be true at all that the weakening of the myth is generally expressive of a debilitation of the Dionysian capacity. Concerning both, however, a glance at the development of the German genius should not leave us in any doubt; in the opera just as in the abstract character of our myth-less existence, in an art sunk to pastime just as in a life guided by concepts, the inartistic as well as life-consuming nature of Socratic optimism had revealed itself to us. Yet there have been indications to console us that nevertheless in some inaccessible abyss the German spirit still rests and dreams, undestroyed, in glorious health, profundity, and Dionysian strength, like a knight sunk in slumber: from which abyss the Dionysian song rises to us to let us know that this German knight even still dreams his primitive Dionysian myth in blissfully earnest visions. Let no one believe that the German spirit has for ever lost its mythical home when it still understands so obviously the voices of the birds which tell of that home. Some day it will find itself awake in all the morning freshness of a deep sleep: then it will slay the dragons, destroy the malignant dwarfs, and waken Brünnhilde – and Wotan's spear itself will be unable to obstruct its course!

My friends, ye who believe in Dionysian music, ye know also what tragedy means to us. There we have tragic myth, born anew from music, – and in this latest birth ye can hope for everything and forget what is most afflicting. What is most afflicting to all of us, however, is – the prolonged degradation in which the German genius has lived estranged from house and home in the service of malignant dwarfs. Ye understand my allusion – as ye will also, in conclusion, understand my hopes.

25

Music and tragic myth are equally the expression of the Dionysian capacity of a people, and are inseparable from each other. Both originate in an ultra Apollonian sphere of art; both transfigure a region in the delightful accords of which all dissonance, just like the terrible picture of the world, dies charmingly away; both play with the sting of displeasure, trusting to their most potent magic; both justify thereby the existence even of the "worst world." Here the Dionysian, as compared with the Apollonian, exhibits itself as the eternal and original artistic force, which in general calls into existence the entire world of phenomena: in the midst of which a new transfiguring appearance becomes necessary, in order to keep alive the animated world of individuation. If we could conceive an incarnation of dissonance – and what is man but that? – then, to be able to live this dissonance would require a glorious illusion which would spread a veil of beauty over its peculiar nature. This is the true function of Apollo as deity of art: in whose name we comprise all the countless manifestations of the fair realm of illusion, which each moment render life in general worth living and make one impatient for the experience of the next moment.

At the same time, just as much of this basis of all existence – the Dionysian substratum of the world – is allowed to enter into the consciousness of human beings, as can be surmounted again by the Apollonian transfiguring power, so that these two art-impulses are constrained to develop their powers in strictly mutual proportion, according to the law of eternal justice. When the Dionysian powers rise with such vehemence as we experience at present, there can be no doubt that, veiled in a cloud, Apollo has already descended to us; whose grandest beautifying influences a coming generation will perhaps behold.

That this effect is necessary, however, each one would most surely perceive by intuition, if once he found himself carried back – even in a dream – into an Old-Hellenic existence. In walking under high Ionic colonnades, looking upwards to a horizon defined by clear and noble lines, with reflections of his transfigured form by his side in shining marble, and around him solemnly marching or quietly moving men, with harmoniously sounding voices and rhythmical pantomime, would he not in the presence of this perpetual influx of beauty have to raise his hand to Apollo and exclaim: "Blessed race of Hellenes! How great Dionysus must be among you, when the Delian god deems such charms necessary to cure you of your dithyrambic madness!" – To one in this frame of mind, however, an aged Athenian, looking up to him with the sublime eye of Æschylus, might answer: "Say also this, thou curious stranger: what sufferings this people must have undergone, in order to be able to become thus beautiful! But now follow me to a tragic play, and sacrifice with me in the temple of both the deities!"

APPENDIX

[Late in the year 1888, not long before he was overcome by his sudden attack of insanity, Nietzsche wrote down a few notes concerning his early work, the Birth of Tragedy. These were printed in his sister's biography (Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches, vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 102 ff.), and are here translated as likely to be of interest to readers of this remarkable work. They also appear in the Ecce Homo. – TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.]

"To be just to the Birth of Tragedy(1872), one will have to forget some few things. It has wrought effects, it even fascinated through that wherein it was amiss – through its application to Wagnerism, just as if this Wagnerism were symptomatic of a rise and going up. And just on that account was the book an event in Wagner's life: from thence and only from thence were great hopes linked to the name of Wagner. Even to-day people remind me, sometimes right in the midst of a talk on Parsifal, that I and none other have it on my conscience that such a high opinion of the cultural value of this movement came to the top. More than once have I found the book referred to as 'the Re-birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music': one only had an ear for a new formula of Wagner's art, aim, task, – and failed to hear withal what was at bottom valuable therein. 'Hellenism and Pessimism' had been a more unequivocal title: namely, as a first lesson on the way in which the Greeks got the better of pessimism, – on the means whereby they overcame it. Tragedy simply proves that the Greeks were no pessimists: Schopenhauer was mistaken here as he was mistaken in all other things. Considered with some neutrality, the Birth of Tragedy appears very unseasonable: one would not even dream that it was begun amid the thunders of the battle of Wörth. I thought these problems through and through before the walls of Metz in cold September nights, in the midst of the work of nursing the sick; one might even believe the book to be fifty years older. It is politically indifferent – un-German one will say to-day, – it smells shockingly Hegelian, in but a few formulæ does it scent of Schopenhauer's funereal perfume. An 'idea' – the antithesis of 'Dionysian versus Apollonian' – translated into metaphysics; history itself as the evolution of this 'idea'; the antithesis dissolved into oneness in Tragedy; through this optics things that had never yet looked into one another's face, confronted of a sudden, and illumined and comprehended through one another: for instance, Opera and Revolution. The two decisive innovations of the book are, on the one hand, the comprehension of the Dionysian phenomenon among the Greeks (it gives the first psychology thereof, it sees therein the One root of all Grecian art); on the other, the comprehension of Socratism: Socrates diagnosed for the first time as the tool of Grecian dissolution, as a typical decadent. 'Rationality' against instinct! 'Rationality' at any price as a dangerous, as a life-undermining force! Throughout the whole book a deep hostile silence on Christianity: it is neither Apollonian nor Dionysian; it negatives all æsthetic values (the only values recognised by the Birth of Tragedy), it is in the widest sense nihilistic, whereas in the Dionysian symbol the utmost limit of affirmation is reached. Once or twice the Christian priests are alluded to as a 'malignant kind of dwarfs,' as 'subterraneans.'"

2

"This beginning is singular beyond measure. I had for my own inmost experience discovered the only symbol and counterpart of history, – I had just thereby been the first to grasp the wonderful phenomenon of the Dionysian. And again, through my diagnosing Socrates as a decadent, I had given a wholly unequivocal proof of how little risk the trustworthiness of my psychological grasp would run of being weakened by some moralistic idiosyncrasy – to view morality itself as a symptom of decadence is an innovation, a novelty of the first rank in the history of knowledge. How far I had leaped in either case beyond the smug shallow-pate-gossip of optimism contra pessimism! I was the first to see the intrinsic antithesis: here, the degenerating instinct which, with subterranean vindictiveness, turns against life (Christianity, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, in a certain sense already the philosophy of Plato, all idealistic systems as typical forms), and there, a formula of highest affirmation, born of fullness and overfullness, a yea-saying without reserve to suffering's self, to guilt's self, to all that is questionable and strange in existence itself. This final, cheerfullest, exuberantly mad-and-merriest Yea to life is not only the highest insight, it is also the deepest, it is that which is most rigorously confirmed and upheld by truth and science. Naught that is, is to be deducted, naught is dispensable; the phases of existence rejected by the Christians and other nihilists are even of an infinitely higher order in the hierarchy of values than that which the instinct of decadence sanctions, yea durst sanction. To comprehend this courage is needed, and, as a condition thereof, a surplus of strength: for precisely in degree as courage dares to thrust forward, precisely according to the measure of strength, does one approach truth. Perception, the yea-saying to reality, is as much a necessity to the strong as to the weak, under the inspiration of weakness, cowardly shrinking, and flight from reality – the 'ideal.' … They are not free to perceive: the decadents have need of the lie, – it is one of their conditions of self-preservation. Whoso not only comprehends the word Dionysian, but also grasps his self in this word, requires no refutation of Plato or of Christianity or of Schopenhauer – he smells the putrefaction."

3

"To what extent I had just thereby found the concept 'tragic,' the definitive perception of the psychology of tragedy, I have but lately stated in the Twilight of the Idols, page 139 (1st edit.): 'The affirmation of life, even in its most unfamiliar and severe problems, the will to life, enjoying its own inexhaustibility in the sacrifice of its highest types, – that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I divined as the bridge to a psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to get rid of terror and pity, not to purify from a dangerous passion by its vehement discharge (it was thus that Aristotle misunderstood it); but, beyond terror and pity, to realise in fact the eternal delight of becoming, that delight which even involves in itself the joy of annihilating!28 In this sense I have the right to understand myself to be the first tragic philosopher – that is, the utmost antithesis and antipode to a pessimistic philosopher. Prior to myself there is no such translation of the Dionysian into the philosophic pathos: there lacks the tragic wisdom, – I have sought in vain for an indication thereof even among the great Greeks of philosophy, the thinkers of the two centuries before Socrates. A doubt still possessed me as touching Heraclitus, in whose proximity I in general begin to feel warmer and better than anywhere else. The affirmation of transiency and annihilation, to wit the decisive factor in a Dionysian philosophy, the yea-saying to antithesis and war, to becoming, with radical rejection even of the concept 'being,' – that I must directly acknowledge as, of all thinking hitherto, the nearest to my own. The doctrine of 'eternal recurrence,' that is, of the unconditioned and infinitely repeated cycle of all things – this doctrine of Zarathustra's might after all have been already taught by Heraclitus. At any rate the portico29 which inherited well-nigh all its fundamental conceptions from Heraclitus, shows traces thereof."

Facsimile of Nietzsches handwriting.

4

"In this book speaks a prodigious hope. In fine, I see no reason whatever for taking back my hope of a Dionysian future for music. Let us cast a glance a century ahead, let us suppose my assault upon two millenniums of anti-nature and man-vilification succeeds! That new party of life which will take in hand the greatest of all tasks, the upbreeding of mankind to something higher, – add thereto the relentless annihilation of all things degenerating and parasitic, will again make possible on earth that too-much of life, from which there also must needs grow again the Dionysian state. I promise a tragic age: the highest art in the yea-saying to life, tragedy, will be born anew, when mankind have behind them the consciousness of the hardest but most necessary wars, without suffering therefrom. A psychologist might still add that what I heard in my younger years in Wagnerian music had in general naught to do with Wagner; that when I described Wagnerian music I described what I had heard, that I had instinctively to translate and transfigure all into the new spirit which I bore within myself…"

1

This Introduction by E. Förster-Nietzsche, which appears in the front of the first volume of Naumann's Pocket Edition of Nietzsche, has been translated and arranged by Mr. A. M. Ludovici.

2

And shall not I, by mightiest desire,In living shape that sole fair form acquire?SWANWICK, trans. of Faust.

3

My friend, just this is poet's task:His dreams to read and to unmask.Trust me, illusion's truths thrice sealedIn dream to man will be revealed.All verse-craft and poetisationIs but soothdream interpretation.

4

Cf. World and Will as Idea, 1. 455 ff., trans, by Haldane and Kemp.

5

Te bow in the dust, oh millions?Thy maker, mortal, dost divine?Cf. Schiller's "Hymn to Joy"; and Beethoven, Ninth Symphony. – TR.

6

World as Will and Idea, I. 323, 4th ed. of Haldane and Kemp's translation. Quoted with a few changes.

7

Zuschauer.

8

Schauer.

9

Anschaulicher.

10

Anschaut.

11

An eternal sea, A weaving, flowing, Life, all glowing. Faust, trans. of Bayard Taylor. – TR.

12

"Here sit I, forming mankindIn my image,A race resembling me, —To sorrow and to weep,To taste, to hold, to enjoy,And not have need of thee,As I!"(Translation in Hæckel's History of the Evolution of Man.)

13

Der Frevel.

14

Die Sünde.

15

We do not measure with such care:Woman in thousand steps is there,But howsoe'er she hasten may.Man in one leap has cleared the way. Faust, trans. of Bayard Taylor. – TR.

16

This is thy world, and what a world! – Faust.

17

See article by Mr. Arthur Symons in The Academy, 30th August 1902.

18

Die mächtige Faust. – Cf. Faust, Chorus of Spirits. – TR.

19

Woe! Woe!Thou hast it destroyed,The beautiful world;With powerful fist;In ruin 'tis hurled! Faust, trans. of Bayard Taylor. – TR.

20

In me thou seest its benefit, —To him who hath but little wit,Through parables to tell the truth.

21

Scheinbild = ειδολον. – TR.

22

That is "the will" as understood by Schopenhauer. – TR.

23

Cf. World and Will as Idea, I. p. 339, trans. by Haldane and Kemp.

24

Cf. Introduction, p. 14.

25

Essay on Elegiac Poetry. – TR.

26

See Faust, Part 1.1. 965 – TR.

27

In the sea of pleasure'sBillowing roll,In the ether-wavesKnelling and toll,In the world-breath'sWavering whole —To drown in, go down in —Lost in swoon – greatest boon!

28

Mr. Common's translation, pp. 227-28.

29

Greek: στοά.