The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1871)

Friedrich Nietzsche
[tr. by Shaun Whiteside]

London: Penguin Books, 1993. ISBN: 0-14-043339-2. Pages: 121, notes

Review © 2003 Branislav L. Slantchev

This is the first book Nietzsche ever published. It ruined his academic reputation but sealed his preeminent status among artists. And it is easy to see why. This chaotic, uneven, "impossible" book (as he calls it) is as ambitious as one can dream: its author proposes to provide a new justification of life, entirely aesthetic, and in the course show how the ancient Greeks achieved the pinnacle of art in Attic tragedy and how Socratism destroyed the primal potency of this art and shackled humanity to an illusion. The author's ambition is matched only by his failure.

His conjecture (for this is all that he offers, not even a theory) is rather straightforward. Human life is meaningless because existence has no purpose in itself. (This is what he is talking about on pp.30-40 where he discusses Hamlet and concludes that it is not the multitude of options that paralyze him but rather the understanding that in the grand scheme of things whatever he does does not matter one way or another.) Any attempt to find moral or ethical justification for life (as all religions do) is false because it substitutes one illusion for another. Human beings do not even see the "real" and "true" existence (which he takes to be a version of Schopenhauer's Will) but instead console themselves with images and dreams. This is the role of Apolline art, which offers soothing and safe representations of the Will that bursts forth through various life forms.

But there is another way to produce art, and this involves drinking straight from the "real" source, knowing the Will (or reality) in its true form. And this art he calls Dionysiac, it is spontaneous, non-rational, without the benefit of the orderly Apolline mediation. It appears through music and is akin to a state of drunkenness, where the participants lose their illusory identity as individuals and merge for a while with the cosmic Will to taste of its essence.

The Dionysiac is not a copy of some mere physical phenomenon, it is the essence of life revealed. It is both extremely optimistic because it affirms the life of the Will and it is extremely dangerous because it denies any meaning to individual existence. And here Nietzsche makes the link with tragedy, especially Attic tragedy as written by Aeschylus and Sophocles, by arguing that this provides an explanation why we delight in the tragic destruction of noble heroes. He denies the Aristotelian view of tragedy as a sort of vicarious experience which ends in catharsis whereby the audience is instructed, educated, elevated, and improved by what they see, usually all this in moral terms. Instead, Nietzsche substitutes his own version of this experience except that it now involves the audience understanding that physical existence even of the noblest hero is inconsequential before the true beauty and power of the eternal Will. In other words, individual existence, just like the Greeks always suspected, is only justified as a source of pleasure for the gods, or in this case, as the aesthetic manifestation of the Will.

For all this to work and create the sense of the "fantastic exuberance of life" (p. 22), the Apolline images must be paired with Dionysiac music to produce that sense of intoxication that is necessary if the audience will be able to shed to shackles of reason for one brief moment and touch the eternal. In particular, the images and words must not be too specific and tied down to a physical phenomenon (in fact, even descriptive music is degenerate (pp.83-4) because it limits imagination). He rails against excessive characterization which he sees in art (true) that turns every protagonist into a "real" human being instead of leaving it as a representative of some vague archetype. This is the decline of Greek tragedy for Nietzsche: the moment when the Chorus with its total lack of individuality is replaced by full-blooded characters, tragedy becomes tied to the physical and loses its potency. In fact, it loses it chance to offer a glimpse of the unbearable lust for life of the Will. The Dionysiac is wholly subjugated by the Apolline, to the detriment of both.

Nietzsche's faults fall into several broad categories. First, his description of Attic tragedy would leave many scratching heads in bewilderment. Not only does Nietzsche misinterpret, willfully and deliberately, the content of many tragedies, but his treatment of the role of the Chorus and the emphasis he places on music (profoundly surprising as we know very little about it) is inspired guesswork at best.

Take the case of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, a play about hubris and its punishment. Nietzsche contrasts this with the Christian myth of the Fall, "in which curiosity, mendacious deception, susceptibility, lasciviousness --- a whole series of predominantly female attributes --- were seen as the origin of evil" (p.50). For Nietzsche, the Aryan version exhibits "active sin" which ensures that man has "complete control of fire, and does not only receive it as a gift from heaven," a kind of sacrilege for the primitive men, a "plundering of divine nature" (p.49). This, of course, is total nonsense. Prometheus, one should recall, was a Titan, an immortal who had as much in common with men as Zeus with ants. He stole the fire from the Olympians in defiance of the new order and gave it to Man but not out of love for this pitiful creature (whom Zeus had planned to replace with a new and improved version anyway), but because he wanted to demonstrate his superiority to the "upstart gods," as Aeschylus has him call the Olympians. It is all too clear that (a) far from sinning actively, Man in this myth is a passive recipient of divine favor for no reason other than the rivalries of the supreme beings, (b) this was obtained not by an act of sacrilege but defiance and hubris, excessive pride. At least in the Semitic myth the woman actually does something, thereby provoking that irascible deity to heap evil on mankind, much like the idiotic outbursts of the Olympians. Nietzsche is simply making stuff up to fit his notions which include a well-placed (but not well-argued) hostility toward religion, and Christianity in particular.

Nietzsche further fails because his anti-rationalist take on the purported role of Socrates in the establishment of modern scientific reason is lacking. He never really proves his thesis and he conveniently forgets the centuries that separate the death of Socrates from the Age of Reason, a period of time hostile to the scientific method and yet curiously unaccounted for by Nietzsche. Worse, his conception of science is fairly primitive (p. 74). He misunderstands the endeavor to "know" the universe because he genuinely believes in some objective "truth" that underpins physical reality (that's fine) and then equates this "truth" with our perception of it (not so fine). That is, he does not see science as a rather tentative activity where theories (and that's all we can ever hope to have) are revised, new evidence accumulated, but where our understanding of the "real" world is really mediated by simple models. Because of this, science will never hit the limit of its optimism and expansion as Nietzsche predicted: It is not a matter of knowing a few facts and then reaching an unknowable stage. It is "knowing" the same facts better and better.

Not only does he fatally underestimate the power of science but he confuses its application with a total rejection of non-rationalist values. Why should art and science negate each other (p. 88)? Why should science and philosophy be at odds with each other? As soon as we depart from the naive mechanical universe of Newton and enter the uncertain world of quantum physics, one certainly notices very quickly how these boundaries are blurred. At any rate, Nietzsche cannot conceive that the same mind can deal with equal doses of scientific reasoning and intuitive understanding. One is never bound by a necessity to apply the same principles in all behavior. In other words, consistency is truly the "hobgoblin of small minds," especially when it means inability to resort to disparate modes of information processing. Nietzsche is guilty of gross simplification of human character.

It is somewhat surprising that he does not conceive of any abstract art other than music. For it is the music's divorce from Apolline images that attracts him so much. He may be forgiven for not seeing possibilities in other art form, including the ostensibly visual ones, like sculpture and painting, but why he would forget about architecture, one of the most sublime art forms, or dance (as distinct from the music that accompanies it), is unclear.

The book also ends with a sort of "umph." The last third of the treatise deals with the "fundamental interconnections between art and people, myth and morality, tragedy and state" (p. 111), something that very few philosophers seem to have dealt with adequately. All the more curious is this omission when one recalls the pride of place accorded to art as propaganda and tool of the State by the Nazis. Featuring more than a few failed artists in its elite, the Nazi government utilized art to a degree unimaginable by many, and they succeeded in creating a new culture, destroying much of what made the Germans civilized in the process. But Nietzsche was right to insist that "without myth all culture loses its healthy and natural creative power" (p.109). Unfortunately, the people who took this lesson to heart ignored the myth that Nietzsche himself tried to create.

Still, several of the book's main themes remain attractive to people of art. The justification of existence as an aesthetic phenomenon is extreme but seems about as good as any moral reason to live. Certainly a bit better than the profoundly gloomy take of the existentialists on absurdity of life. The rampant elitism of the book ("Why should the artist feel obliged to accommodate himself to a force whose strength lies purely in its numbers?" --- i.e. the audience) will also find receptive listeners among this crowd. Nietzsche's duality of art as rationalized images and irrational impulses, with the best art combining both sources of inspiration, the Apolline and Dionysiac, has been celebrated for many decades and will probably rightly continue to be.

In the end, The Birth of Tragedy remains a forceful expose of the author's fascination with art and aesthetics, loosely applied to Greek tragedy, and even more loosely developed into anything remotely approaching a theory. The narrative is much worse than Nietzsche's later writings, which makes it very difficult to read. Still, a rewarding and thought-provoking piece that every educated Westerner should have read anyway.

November 6, 2003