32 pages • 1 hour read
Friedrich NietzscheThe Birth of Tragedy
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1872A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Redemptive Power of Art
Nietzsche confronts the paradox that tragedy, although depicting terrible suffering, gives pleasure to its audience. In the ancient period, Aristotle argued that tragedy does this by bringing about a catharsis, the purging of pent-up feelings of fear and pity. Nietzsche’s answer in The Birth of Tragedy is somewhat similar to Aristotle’s, as he argues that tragedy—and the best of art in general—offers release and redemption for humans by helping them confront the tragic realities of existence.
For Nietzsche, life and reality are fundamentally tragic and meaningless, since human beings are at the mercy of an indifferent universal will. However, art has the power to transform this “horror and absurdity of existence” (40) into something that one finds beautiful and longs to experience again and again. It does this by dressing up terrible tragic reality with Apolline artifice, which Nietzsche defines as beautiful appearance or illusion, in the process rendering it attractive. Nietzsche names the sublime and the comic as two aesthetic qualities that transform the tragedy and absurdity of existence into something pleasing to behold.
In this way, art is more than an “imitation of nature,” as it was understood by Aristotle and other ancient thinkers, but is its own separate reality, “a metaphysical supplement to the truth of nature, coexisting with it in order to overcome it” (114). By creating art, human beings are able to surmount their hostile condition in the universe and find solace and a reason to go on living. The Birth of Tragedy as a whole is Nietzsche’s defense of tragedy (and thus, art in general) for its power to heal and console human beings in the face of suffering and the senselessness of life. Indeed, this role of art is so important that, to Nietzsche, “existence and the world seem justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon” (115); in a sense, the universe exists only to be transformed into art. Art does not only depict life, but changes the lives of those who make and experience it.
Nietzsche also firmly believes that art has the power to save Western civilization itself from its overreliance on rationality and science, which he believes will lead only to disappointment and potential anarchy. In reviving the power of art in its Dionysian tragic form, Western culture will experience a rebirth.
The Primal Power of Music
The full title of the book is The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, and music takes on an importance coequal with tragedy for Nietzsche. As implied in the title, Nietzsche sees music as an impulse that gives rise to all artistic expression, including drama and poetry, as the fundamental expression of the tragic nature of reality.
Following from Schopenhauer (See: Background) and other German Romantic thinkers, Nietzsche interprets music as the purest of the arts because it taps into emotions and ideas directly instead of depicting the world of “phenomena” (i.e., visible or sensible things) as literature and painting do. This being the case, music is best able to express the feeling of tragedy, which is a state of the soul that transcends specific physical things and actions. Music exerts a strong and mysterious emotional effect on the listener, not by reminding him of specific objects, but by evoking feelings, emotions, longings, and passions—as seen, for example, in the love music in Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde (101).
This musical focus leads Nietzsche to criticize contemporary music, and particularly the musical-dramatic art form of opera, which is believed to emulate tragedy. In Chapter 19, Nietzsche criticizes traditional opera for its artificiality and “conventional aesthetics.” By contrast, he argues that Wagner has revolutionized opera by moving it closer to the dramatic truth embodied in Greek tragedy. This is because, according to Nietzsche, Wagner’s operas use the full Dionysian force of music to put the listener in touch with primal, metaphysical reality rather than merely depicting things or emotional states. The power of Wagner’s art is rooted in the fact that he uses music, “the immediate language of the will” (79), to “give birth to the myth […] and the tragic myth above all: the myth that speaks symbolically of the Dionysiac wisdom” (79).
One of the aspects of music that most conveys the tragic spirit is its use of dissonance. Dissonance is like a mirror to the tragic reality, expressing pain while at the same time producing pleasure in the listener, just as tragedy does. Ultimately, the succession of dissonance and consonance in music, or of pain and pleasure in tragedy, should not be taken too seriously, but is rather part of a playful artistic “game” of life (115). In this way, reality itself is shown to be an aesthetic phenomenon, an interplay of feelings and emotions such as we perceive in music.
Reason as Decline, Not Progress
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche breaks with much of traditional intellectual Western thought by arguing that reason and science did not represent the highest achievement of the ancient Greeks, but were instead the beginning of their decline. Rather than regarding the Greeks’ rational inquiry and serene, balanced approach to art as cultural ideals worthy of emulation, Nietzsche insists that an overemphasis on rationality has caused a more general cultural decline for the West ever since.
Nietzsche argues that the supposedly serene or “cheerful” phase of Greek civilization followed an earlier period in which mythology and the tragic understanding of life had greater importance. The earliest epic and lyric poets, such as Homer, captured the primordial force of music by seeking to craft poetic forms that imitated music’s form and power, thus laying the foundations for the rise of tragedy. For Nietzsche, the true greatness of the Greeks consisted in their having grasped the tragic nature of reality and, with it, a Dionysiac abandonment to primal human impulses in response to the meaningless of existence. He regards the use of the Greek chorus as embodying the mythic quality of early Greek tragedy’s subject matter and aesthetic ethos.
Nietzsche acknowledges that Apolline reason served as a necessary restraint on these passions, but he asserts that the total victory of rational values with Socrates and Euripides created a falsely optimistic view of reality and human potential. For Nietzsche, reason and science have inevitable limitations—for example, they are unable to foster a mythical ideal or imaginative vision upon which people are willing to base their lives. Nietzsche argues that a failure to recognize these limitations will ultimately cause disappointment, despair, and chaos, warning that the collapse of faith in scientific progress could unleash anarchy in human society.
Nietzsche’s thesis challenges the supremacy of the European Enlightenment—which had tried to recapture the ancient Greek spirit of rational inquiry and democracy—by advocating instead for a more Romantic view of the world and the power of art and emotion. Nietzsche argues that European society will inevitably have to cast off the heritage of the Enlightenment and return to nature and primal impulses, thereby rejecting the dominance of reason and embracing the Dionysian force once again.
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By Friedrich Nietzsche
