The Birth of Tragedy

 from Prideaux

THE IMPACT OF NIETZSCHE’S FIRST BOOK, THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY and the Spirit of Music, has proved far greater than the narrow and time-bound concerns that drove Nietzsche to write it. The book originated partly as a young man’s impassioned attack on the cultural degeneration of his day, and partly as a manifesto for the cultural regeneration of the newly unified state of Germany through the vision of Richard Wagner. It endures as a revolutionary perception of the elusive transactions made between the rational and the instinctive, between life and art, between the world of culture and the human response to it. 

The book’s famous opening tells us that, just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, so the continuing development of art and culture down the ages depends on the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Like the two sexes, they are engaged in a continual struggle interrupted only by temporary periods of reconciliation. 

He identifies the Apollonian with the plastic arts, particularly sculpture but also painting, architecture and dreams, which, at that pre-Freudian time, did not represent the messy eruption of guilty subconscious effluvia, but still held their ancient significance as prophecy, enlightenment and revelation. The qualities of Apollo can be summed up more or less as the apparent, the describable: in Schopenhauerian terms corresponding roughly to “representation.” The world of Apollo is made up of moral, rational individuals, those who exemplify “the principz'um individuariom's, whose gestures and gaze speak to us of all the intense pleasure, wisdom and beauty of ‘semblance.’ ” ‘ 

The arts belonging to Dionysus are music and tragedy. Dionysus the twice-born son of Zeus was perceived in ancient Greece as both man and animal. He represented an enchanted world of extraor~ dinary experience transcending existential boundaries. The god of wine and intoxication, of drink and drugs, of ritual madness and ecstasy, god of the fictional world of the theater, of the mask, of impersonation and illusion; he is the god whose arts subvert the normal or individual identity of his followers as they are transformed by them. 

Music and tragedy are both capable of erasing the individual spirit and awakening impulses which in their heightened forms cause the subjective to dwindle into complete self-oblivion, while the spirit is mystically transported to a transcendent state of bliss or horror. In Attic tragedy one of the names of Dionysus was “the Eater of Raw F lesh.” Only through the spirit of music can we understand the ecstasy involved in self-annihilation. One thinks of today’s rock festival-goers, or of Nietzsche describing his response to Tristan as having laid his ear against the heart of the universal will and felt the tumultuous lust for life as a thundering torrent. He illustrates the point to his own contemporaries by a reference with which they would be familiar: the frenzied throngs that had roamed medieval Germany in a mania of singing and dancing, the so-called singers and dancers of St. John and St. Vitus. (Wagner had referred to them elliptically in Die Meistem'nger van Nitmberg.) In them, Nietzsche recognized the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks. Intoxication, music, singing and dancing were the activities in which the princz'pium indiw’duatz’om': was lost. Here was the Dionysian response to the pain of life. 

Where did the Greeks’ pessimism, their attraction toward the tragic myth, toward the fearful, the evil, the cruel, the Eater of F lesh, the orgiastic, the enigmatic and destructive, begin? The genius of Greek tragedy, he tells us, is that through the miracle of the Hellenic will, the Apollonian and Dionysian are coupled. The pre-Socratic Greek playwright is an Apollonian dream artist and a Dionysian ec~ static artist at the same time, and this is achieved through the chorus. 

The chorus represents the origin of tragedy and it is a representa~ tion of the Dionysian state. The introduction of the chorus is a negation of naturalism. Nietzsche warns against the culture of his own day: “with our current veneration for the natural and the real, we have arrived at the opposite pole to all idealism, and have landed in the region of waxworks.”2 

To understand the death of Greek tragedy, we have only to consider the Socratic maxims: that virtue is knowledge, that all sins arise from ignorance, and that the happy man is the virtuous man. 

In this basically optimistic and rational formula lies tragedy’s extinction. In post-Socratic plays the virtuous hero must be dialectical. There must be a necessary and visible bond between virtue and knowledge, between faith and morality. Socrates reduces the transcendental justice of Aeschylus to “the Hat and impudent principle of poetic justice.” 

Socrates is “the mystagogue of science” in whose eye the lovely gleam of madness never glowed. Socrates instigated the “unimaginable, universal greed for knowledge, stretching across most of the cultured world, and presenting itself as the true task for anyone of higher abilities. [Socrates] led science on to the high seas, from which it could never again be driven completely . . . for the first time, thanks to this universality, a common network of thought was stretched over the whole globe, with prospects of encompassing even the laws of the entire solar system.”3 . ’ 

People are held fast by the Socratic delusion that pleasure in understanding can heal the eternal wound of existence. “Anyone who has experienced the intense pleasure of a Socratic insight, and felt it spread out in ever-widening circles as it attempted to encompass the entire world of appearances, will forever feel there can be no sharper goad to life.”4 

But this is to ignore that the world is more than a replica of phenomena. There also exists the Dionysian, the Will. And so, “in this late period of Socratic culture, man . . . remains eternally hungry.” Reduced to rationality, Alexandrian man is basically “a librarian and proofreader, sacrificing his sight miserably to book dust and [printing] errors.”S 

Is our flight into science and scientific proof perhaps a kind of fear, an escape from pessimism, a subtle, last resort against truth? Morally speaking, is it a sort of cowardice and falsity? 

The problem of science must be faced. Science was a post-Socratic problem in Greece, Nietzsche observes, as it remains a problem in post-Darwinian Europe. By faith in the explicability of nature and in knowledge as a panacea, science annihilates myth. As a result, “we fall into a senile, unproductive love of existence.” 

Never has there been a period in which culture was more enfeebled. When the disaster that is slumbering in the womb of theoretical culture gradually begins to frighten modern man, the only salvation for culture will be to break open the enchanted gate leading into the Hellenic magic mountain? 

Who holds the key to the magic mountain? Whose power is strong enough to break down the gate? Schopenhauer and, inevitably, Wagner. Opera, in short, with its marriage of words and music presents the new tragic art form in which the Dionysian and Apollonian are reunited. 

Wagner’s music of the future is based on the necessary revival of tragic myth (German rather than Greek) and dissonance. His use of musical dissonance reflects and acknowledges the dissonance of man’s soul and the tension within him between Will and Representation, between Apollonian and Dionysian. 

Who, Nietzsche asks, can listen to the third act of Tristan und Isolde, “this shepherd’s dance of metaphysics,” without expiring in a spasmodic unharnessing of all the wings of the soul? How could anyone “fail to be shattered immediately”?7 A Dionysian experience if ever there was one and a fully German one, mythically speaking. 

In some hitherto inaccessible abyss the German spirit still rests 

and dreams, undestroyed and Dionysian in strength, like a knight sunk in slumber; and from this abyss the Dionysian rises to our cars. In Tristan (here things become complicated) the Dionysian is, in reality, in the service of the Apollonian. The highest goal of tragedy is when Dionysus speaks the words of Apollo and Apollo, finally, the words of Dionysus. Thus is the highest goal of tragedy, and of all art, attained. Having quoted copiously from the libretto of Tristan, the book concludes with an imagined meeting between a modern man and an ancient Greek who go together to the tragedy to sacrifice to both deities. While The Birth of Tragedy is a book that is more about culture than about how people should lead their lives, it does introduce us to ideas that Nietzsche would return to as his philosophy developed. The concept of human nature’s duality, expressed in The Birth of Tragedy by the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and the crucial need to confront the illusion of certainty provided by science would occupy his thoughts for the rest of his active life.