User:Laurier Rochon/readingnotes/nietzsche birth of tragedy

Nietzsche > The Birth of Tragedy

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The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872) is a 19th-century work of dramatic theory by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It was reissued in 1886 as The Birth of Tragedy, Or: Hellenism and Pessimism (Die Geburt der Tragedie, Oder: Griechentum und Pessimismus). The later edition contained a prefatory essay, An Attempt at Self-Criticism, wherein Nietzsche commented on this very early work.ssion.

Nietzsche found in classical Athenian tragedy an art form that transcended the pessimism and nihilism of a fundamentally meaningless world. The Greek spectators, by looking into the abyss of human suffering and affirming it, passionately and joyously affirmed the meaning of their own existence. They knew themselves to be infinitely more than petty individuals, finding self-affirmation not in another life, not in a world to come, but in the terror and ecstasy alike celebrated in the performance of tragedies.

Originally educated as a philologist, Nietzsche discusses the history of the tragic form and introduces an intellectual dichotomy between the Dionysian and the Apollonian (very loosely: reality undifferentiated by forms versus reality as differentiated by forms). Nietzsche claims life always involves a struggle between these two elements, each battling for control over the existence of humanity. In Nietzsche's words, "Wherever the Dionysian prevailed, the Apollonian was checked and destroyed.... wherever the first Dionysian onslaught was successfully withstood, the authority and majesty of the Delphic god Apollo exhibited itself as more rigid and menacing than ever." Yet neither side ever prevails due to each containing the other in an eternal, natural check, or balance.

Nietzsche argues that the tragedy of Ancient Greece was the highest form of art due to its mixture of both Apollonian and Dionysian elements into one seamless whole, allowing the spectator to experience the full spectrum of the human condition. The Dionysian element was to be found in the music of the chorus, while the Apollonian element was found in the dialogue which gave a concrete symbolism that balanced the Dionysiac revelry. Basically, the Apollonian spirit was able to give form to the abstract Dionysian.

Notes from the text :

• 1 His first book - published in 1872 (28 years old)

• 2 "Is pessimism necessarily the sign of collapse, destruction, of disaster, of the exhausted and enfeebled [...]?"

• 2 "Is there a pessimism of strength?"

• 2 "Is there perhaps a way of suffering from the very fullness of life?"

• 2 "The problem of science canno be explained by science"

• 2 Referring to his own book : I call it something poorly written, ponderous, embarrassing [...] without any impulse for any logical clarity, extremely self-confident [...]

• 3 Nietzsche was trained as a philologist : the study of language in written historical sources

• 3 "What is Dionysian" : Apollonian & Dionysian - the duality

• 3 Where then must tragedy have come from? Perhaps out of joy, out of power, out of overflowing health, out of overflowing fullness?

• 3 Was Epicurus an optimist - percisely because he was suffering?

• 3 "[...] for all life rests on appearance, art, illusion, optics, the need for perspective and for error"

• 4 Citing Schopenhauer : "what did he think about tragedy? He says 'What gives everything tragic its characteristic drive for elevation is the working out of the recognition that the world, that life, can provide no proper satisfaction, and thus our devotion to it is not worthwhile, the tragic spirit consists of that insight - it leads therefore to resignation.(The World As Will and Idea)'"

• 5 "I am convinced that art is the highest task and the essential metaphysical capability of this life."

• 5 the visual arts = Apollonian, the non-visual art of music = Dionysian. They embody the separate artistic worlds of dream and intoxication

• 6 "Even the philosophical man has the presentiment that under this reality in which we live and have our being lies hidden a second, totally different reality and that thus the former is an illusion."

• 6 "[...] out inner most beings, the secret underground in al of us, experiences its dreams with deeop enjoyment and a sense of delightful necessity."

• 6 "In the same place Schopenhauer also described for us the tremendous awe which seizes a man when he suddenly doubts his ways of comprehending illusion, when the principle of reason, in any one of its forms, appears to suffer from an exception. If we add to this awe the ecstatic rapture, which rises up out of the same collapse of the principium individuationis from the innermost depths of a human being, indeed, from the innermost depths of nature, then we have a glimpse into the essence of the Dionysian, which is presented to us most closely through the analogy to intoxication."

• 7 "In comparison to these unmediated artistic states of nature, every artist is an “imitator,” and, in fact, is an artist either of Apollonian dream or Dionysian intoxication or, finally—as in Greek tragedy, for example— simultaneously an artist of intoxication and of dreams."

• 7 "In these Greek festivals, for the first time nature achieves its artistic jubilee. In them, for the first time, the tearing apart of the principii individuationis [the principle of individuation] becomes an artistic phenomenon. Here that dreadful witches’ cauldron of lust and cruelty was without power. The strange mixture and ambiguity in the emotions of the Dionysian celebrant only remind him—as healing potions remind one of deadly poison—of that phenomenon that pain awakens joy, that the jubilation in his chest rips out cries of agony."

• 8 "How else could a people [the Greeks] so emotionally sensitive, so spontaneously desiring, so singularly capable of suffering, have been able to endure their existence, unless the same qualities, with a loftier glory flowing round them, manifested themselves in their gods."

• 9 "Wherever we encounter the "naive" in art, we have to recognize the highest effect of Apollonian culture."

• 9 "For the more I become aware of those all-powerful natural artistic impulses and the fervent yearning for illusion contained in them, the desire to be redeemed through appearances, the more I feel myself pushed to the metaphysical assumption that the true being and the primordial oneness, ever-suffering and entirely contradictory, constantly uses the delightful vision, the joyful illusion, to redeem itself; we are compelled to experience this illusion, totally caught up in it and constituted by it, as the truly non-existent, that is, as a continuous development in time, space, and causality, in other words, as empirical reality. But if we momentarily look away from our own “reality,” if we grasp our empirical existence and the world in general as an idea of the primordial oneness created in every moment, then we must now consider our dream as the illusion of an illusion, as well as an even higher fulfilment of the original hunger for illusion."

• 13 "This [ancient] tradition tells us very emphatically that tragedy developed out of the tragic chorus and originally consisted only of a chorus and nothing else."

• 13 "Schiller has already provided an infinitely more valuable insight into the meaning of the chorus in the famous preface to the Bride from Messina, which sees the chorus as a living wall which tragedy draws around itself in order to separate itself cleanly from the real world and to protect its ideal space and its poetical freedom for itself"

• 14 "[...]that’s what the Greek saw in his satyr, and so he did not yet mistake him for an ape. Quite the contrary: the satyr was the primordial image of man, the expression of his highest and strongest emotions, as an inspired reveller, enraptured by the approach of the god, as a sympathetic companion, in whom the suffering of the god was repeated, as a messenger bringing wisdom from the deepest heart of nature, as a perceptible image of the sexual omnipotence of nature, which the Greek was accustomed to observing with reverent astonishment. The satyr was something sublime and divine[...]"

• 15 "And just as tragedy, with its metaphysical consolation, draws attention to the eternal life of that existential core in the continuing destruction of appearances, so the symbolism of the satyr chorus already expresses metaphorically that primordial relationship between the thing-in-itself and appearance."

• 15 "[...]the actor, who, if he is really gifted, sees perceptibly in front of him the image of the role he has to play"[...]

• 15 "Enchantment is the precondition for all dramatic art."

• 15 "Thus, drama is the Apollonian embodiment of Dionysian knowledge and effects, and, hence, is separated as if by an immense gulf from epic."

• 16 "According to this insight and to the tradition, Dionysus, the actual stage hero and central point of the vision, was at first, in the very oldest periods of tragedy, not really present but was only imagined as present. That is, originally tragedy is only “chorus” and not “drama.” Later the attempt was made to show the god as real and then to present in a way visible to every eye the form of the vision together with the transfiguring setting. At that point “drama” in the strict sense begins."

• 19 "Greek tragedy died in a manner different from all its ancient sister artistic styles: it died by suicide, as a result of an insoluble, hence tragic, conflict; whereas, all those others passed away in advanced old age with the most beautiful and most tranquil deaths."

• 19 "By contrast, with the death of Greek tragedy there was created an immense emptiness, profoundly felt everywhere."