When Nietzsche arrived in Basle, in May 1869, to assume his duties as professor of philology, he had already been discouraged about his chosen profession for several years. His long-term interest in the arts, especially music, and his passion for philosophy, stimulated by his reading of Schopenhauer, had focused him on insight and creativity. Philology, as Nietzsche viewed it, was a sterile workplace for narrow-minded scholars and offered no outlet for creativity. He idealized Schopenhauer, on the other hand, as a creative genius, and Schopenhauer had consciously encouraged that image of himself in his writings. While it is often suggested that Nietzsche followed in Schopenhauer's footsteps, philosophically, it can be argued that the identification was more closely with the man than with the thought. Nietzsche had readily adopted Schopenhauer as a father figure, in spite of the fact that the philosopher had died several years prior to Nietzsche's discovery of his World as Will and Representation. Reading and admiration of Schopenhauer continued, throughout the early years in Basle, to provide Nietzsche with a medium for making friends and modeling his own approaches to genius.
The most important of these friendships was with Richard Wagner, whom Nietzsche had met in Leipzig, in late 1868. Wagner had just produced his new opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and their early discussions were dominated by music and Schopenhauer's philosophy. Nietzsche quickly transferred his need for a father figure to the very-much alive Wagner (who was, in fact, the exact age that Nietzsche's father would have been). Thus, in Basle, Nietzsche quickly fell in with Wagner and his mistress, Cosima von Bülow, who had been living near Lucerne for a couple of years. Nietzsche clearly recognized Wagner as a genius and Wagner clearly accepted Nietzsche as a brilliant academic who might be useful in the formulation and execution of his musical revolution. Cosima was thoroughly devoted to her beloved musical master (father of her three children) and took over all practical details of running the Wagner household as well as the Wagner image. This placed Nietzsche in constant contact with Cosima, who was only seven years older, so not only did Nietzsche identify Wagner as the father image but had a significantly Oedipal relationship with Cosima.
Beginning in early 1870, Nietzsche had written several essays on the Greeks -- "The Greek Music-Drama," "Socrates and Tragedy," "The Dionysian Weltanschauung," and "The Birth of the Tragic Idea." Wagner was working on the last act of his opera Siegfried and, at the same time, was writing his autobiography, Mein Leben, while working on his Beethoven essay. It was an intense atmosphere of mutual stimulation. While Nietzsche proofread portions of Mein Leben, Wagner encouraged him to break away from the scholarly limitations of his essays and put his thoughts into the larger framework of a book on Greek tragedy.
Nietzsche's work was interrupted briefly in the late summer of 1870. France and Germany were at war and Nietzsche's German patriotism bloomed in spite of the fact that he had given up his Prussian citizenship in order to move to Basel. The University allowed him a leave of absence on condition that he would not actually fight so Nietzsche trained as a medic. At most, he saw a month of duty on the front line, but it was enough. He had seen both German and Frenchmen slaughtered; he was also very ill. After recuperating for a month in Naumburg, he was back at Basle teaching.
The book, as a philosophical text in philology, was complete by late winter in 1871; however, according to sister Elizabeth's recollections, the Wagners were pressuring Nietzsche to connect the work more closely with Wagner's musical projects. Nietzsche had first conceived the title as "Greek Cheerfulness" but now removed several chapters, focused solely on tragedy, and built some connections to Wagner -- hence the new title, "Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music," a Schopenhaueran text that treated professional philology recklessly. Nietzsche submitted the book to Englemann in Leipzig in April; but, when Engelmann delayed, Nietzsche's friends convinced him to take it to Wagner's publisher, Fritzsch, who was primarily a publisher of musical materials. Wagner himself was distressed by this, fearing that Nietzsche would lose his professional credibility (which he did!) but it seems to have allowed (perhaps even encouraged) Nietzsche to push the volume even more thoroughly into a tract on Wagner's musical mission. The book, then, is full of Wagner from start to finish --- aside from the second half in its entirety, note especially the "Preface to Richard Wagner" and the quote from the fatherly Hans Sachs (Die Meistersinger) on the second page.
Considering all this, The Birth of Tragedy is a confusion of professional philology, philosophical insight, and admiration of musical art. As a work in philology, it was almost immediately rejected and it virtually destroyed Nietzsche's career. The music theme was so closely associated with Wagner that it became a complete embarrassment to Nietzsche once he himself had achieved some distance and independence. It stands, then, as Nietzsche's first philosophical work in which a maze of questions are first opened, partially identified, and only very sketchily answered. While Nietzsche's philosophical dependence on Schopenhauer is obvious, at this point, it is also clear that Nietzsche has already set an independent path of his own. (Walter Kaufmann's notes are especially valuable in this regard.)
Nietzsche believed that tragedy served an important cultural function for the Athenians and that tragedy was needed. The thesis is twofold --- that there is a problem in Athenian culture and that tragedy is a solution of a particular kind to that problem. It is important to recognize that the "problem" is not uniquely Greek; the Greeks were merely exemplars of human culture. The problem that Nietzsche has in mind is central to all human existence, though it will emerge in diverse ways in diverse cultures, depending on how those cultures have disposed themselves toward it. Since Nietzsche sees the spirit of tragedy as a crucial means to approaching (if not solving) this problem, it is not surprising that Nietzsche argues for the re-emergence of tragic art, in diverse ways, within modern cultures. Nietzsche will eventually call himself a "tragic philosopher." Let us begin by trying to understand just what this problem is.
In suggesting that the Greeks had a problem at all, Nietzsche was departing from the scholarly traditions of his age, within which the Greeks were viewed as a happy, perhaps naive and simple people. Thoroughly stirred by Schopenhauer's philosophical views, Nietzsche imagined that the Greeks, like all humans, were grappling with pessimism. The universe in which we live is the product of great interacting forces (wills); but we neither observe nor know these as such. What we put together as our conceptions of the world never actually addresses the underlying realities; thus, we are buffeted about like so many leaves or twigs in a flood tide. Life in the world is full of pain and torment; perhaps it would be better not to live at all. Sophocles wrote, "Show me the man who longs to live a day beyond his time, who turns his back on a decent length of life, I'll show the world a man who clings to folly. For the long, looming days lay up a thousand things closer to pain than pleasure, and the pleasures disappear. . . Not to be born is best when all is reckoned in." (Chorus, lines 1378-1389, "Oedipus at Colonus") It is human destiny, then, to be controlled by the darkest universal realities and to live life in a human-dreamt world of illusions. [Note: I will use the word universe' to indicate the fundamental metaphysical realities and reserve the word world' for the physical and social realities as we conceptualize (imagine) them. Thus the problem lies in the disparity between universe and world. Albert Camus called this disparity "the Absurd" and Jean-Paul Sartre spoke of "the Nausea" but Nietzsche had already used both expressions sixty years beforehand.]
It was precisely this human-dreamt world that the Greeks had developed into perfection from the Homeric legends onward. The Olympian complex of deities, combined with all the details of their heroic lives and their numerous interactions with men and women of earth, formed a world picture in which individual people can live. This picture literally rendered humans as individuals, capable of greatness, always of significance. There is, in this world, objective clarity. The beings are almost sculpted. Hence, Athenians mature within the illusions of a world and life that is under control and that has clear models of personal significance and greatness. It is a beautiful creation. But it is, as Nietzsche observes, an Apollinian aesthetics, Apollo being the god who most typifies the Olympian complex in this regard. (BT, 1, p. 36)
What happens in the creation of a livable world? First of all, we establish the principle of individuation. This is similar to what Freud later called the Reality Principle, the separation of ego and world, the "I" and the "other." The fundamental moral question can only be answered when we have begun this process. That is, we can suggest answers to the question "How shall I live?" only after we have suggested who I am, as a being, and what the world in which I must live is like. To know the world is to have concepts of its structure, objects, and rules; but to know the world is also, by a rule of symmetry, to know myself as an individual.
Now we are in a position to see the problem. Because the creation of self-and-world necessarily "misses the point," that is, ignores other aspects of the true universal reality, we will always wind up denying everything that fails to fit the specifics of our world-creation. As time passes, the summation of denied experience begins to loom large; it becomes the dark side of reality, that which we ignore or actively repress. This is similar to what Carl Jung called the Shadow; and similar to Jung's beliefs, if the Shadow is ignored, it eventually "strikes us when we're looking the other way." [Note: this is a central theme in all of Nietzsche's thinking and one of the reasons why Nietzsche is so frequently misunderstood. While Wagner moved from here toward his "disappointing" work Parsifal, Nietzsche moved toward his major work Human, All-Too-Human. Surely the title of this work itself announced Nietzsche's focus on this strange shadow creature that all human attempts at world-creation must co-create.]
The dark side makes itself apparent and forces us to confront whatever we have tried to shut out of our nice, tidy livable world. Thus, for Nietzsche, while the Greeks, and the Athenians in particular, had developed a rich world view based on Apollo and the other Olympian gods, they had rendered themselves largely ignorant of reality's dark side, as represented in the god Dionysus. Only in the distant past, and largely outside of Athens, had Dionysian festivals paved the way to direct (and destructive) experience of life's darkest sides --- intoxication, sexual license, absorption by the primal horde, in short, dissolution of the individual (occasionally, actual dismemberment!) and re-immersion into a common organic whole. (BT, 2, pp. 39-40)
The issue, then, or so Nietzsche thought, is how to experience and understand the Dionysian side without destroying the obvious values of the Apollinian. (See cartoon.) It is not healthy for an individual, or for a whole society, to become entirely absorbed in the rule of one or the other. The soundest (healthiest) foothold is in both. Nietzsche's theory of Athenian tragic drama suggests exactly how, before Euripides and Socrates, the Dionysian and Apollinian elements of life were artistically woven together. The Greek spectator became healthy through direct experience of the Dionysian within the protective spirit-of-tragedy. In fact, Nietzsche's interpretation of tragedy takes on the status of a comprehensive theory of art. "It is with them that nature for the first time attains her artistic jubilee; it is with them that the destruction of the principle of individuation for the first time becomes an artistic phenomenon." (BT, 2, p. 40, my emphasis) "The same impulse which calls art into being, as the complement and consummation of existence, seducing one to a continuation of life, was also the cause of the Olympian world which the Hellenic will' made use of as a transfiguring mirror. Thus do the gods justify the life of man: they themselves live it --- the only satisfactory theodicy!" (BT, 3, p. 43, my emphasis) And finally, "we may assume that were are merely images and artistic projections for the true author, and that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art --- for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified." (BT, 5, p. 52)
From section 5 onward, Nietzsche constructs his exact theory of how Attic tragedy evolved from music through some clear stages to its own tragic end. Early on, the only symbolic image in the theater was that of Dionysus himself and the chorus represented satyrs (half deer and half men). Costuming was dropped for the chorus and symbolic masked figures were added, on stage, to depict those whose actions were being "discussed;" the chorus continued to face the stage throughout. In the end, the chorus was turned around to face the spectators and new (and more) figures were placed on the stage. The figures lost their symbolic significance and became actors in our sense; the chorus became commentators and interpreters. Authentic tragedy --- that is, tragedy prior to these last corruptions --- centered upon the chorus, who remained symbolic of satyrs at least. We can note that the typical Greek theater was an amphitheater extending more than 180 degrees so that it delivered the eyes of the spectators directly to the central circular platform and onto the backs of the chorus, who looked away from them to the masked characters on the stage. Thus the chorus was naturally an extension of the spectators and easily became the medium through which the spectators moved into the musical expression of the dramatic scene.
Nietzsche writes, "The Greek man of culture felt himself nullified in the presence of the satyric chorus; and this is the most immediate effect of the Dionysian tragedy, that the state and society and, quite generally, the gulfs between man and man give way to an overwhelming feeling of unity leading back to the very heart of nature. The metaphysical comfort --- that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable --- this comfort appears in incarnate clarity in the chorus of satyrs, a chorus of natural beings who live ineradicably, as it were, behind all civilization and remain eternally the same, despite the changes of generations and the history of nations. With this chorus the profound Hellene, uniquely susceptible to the tenderest and deepest suffering, comforts himself, having looked boldly right into the terrible destructiveness of so-called world history as well as the cruelty of nature, and being in danger of longing for a Buddhistic negation of the Will. Art saves him, and through art --- life." (BT, 7) The passage is interesting in that Nietzsche does not see the pessimism of Schopenhauer as the necessary result; tragic drama, Nietzsche thought, succeeds in salvaging the individual human.
In concluding this discussion of tragedy as it was, we should note the metaphysical complexity of the artistic task, as Nietzsche proposed it. The apparent (phenomenal) world that we create and in which we live is a glorious, necessary illusion (fabrication). (BT, 3) Obviously, it must involve or relate to "realities" because we are successful in living in this world; however, it is no accurate or direct description of genuine universal reality. It is illusion that is life-creating and life-encouraging. Apollo is symbolic of this fabricated world; and Homer is the preeminent "naive artist" of the Apollinian world. Dionysus is symbolic of those other realities that are glossed over and ignored as we press onward toward individuation and the heroic image. Music (lyric music) emerges, in the eyes of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche, as the one direct way in which we can possess authentic experience of these universal realities; in a sense, music comes directly to us out of the fundamental realities of the universe. Thus world-descriptive concepts and musical forms are related to quite different metaphysical categories. It is the union of the two in tragic drama that creates the spirit-of-tragedy, which is the healing spirit in which the existential situation of humankind becomes reconciled.
While Nietzsche sees Euripides as the villain who corrupted tragedy beyond repair, it is really Socrates (and Plato and Aristotle, afterwards) who became the guiding light for the transformation of greek culture into Hellenism and what Nietzsche later calls Alexandrianism. This, indeed, is the Greek culture that Europeans looked back upon as their ideal, throughout the Renaissance; and consequently, this is the cultural foundation of European modernism. Insofar as Nietzsche wants to define a critical problem in modern European culture, therefore, he must create a case against Socrates. Such a case is strikingly counter-intuitive, of course, since Socrates is our classic hero, the "gadfly of Athens" and the father of philosophy itself.
Socrates presented an entirely new theme, contradictory to Dionysus but also turning away from Apollo. Apollo and Dionysus were both compatible with art; indeed, the naive artist was Apollinian. Socrates was antagonistic to art as such. Nietzsche claims that Socrates turned the relationship between instinct (intuition) and consciousness around. Prior to Socrates, all productive/creative force was driven by instinct and critically moderated by consciousness. Socrates' daimon shows us that, for Socrates, all creation is driven by consciousness and instinct is only occasionally allowed the position of moderator. The highest statement of this Socratic commitment is in the deduction that "virtue is knowledge;" we err only in ignorance. In Socrates, the life of the mind is elevated above all else. Even death, as we see in the Phaedo, is overcome by the life of the mind. (BT, 13, pp. 86-89) In the end, it is comprehension that justifies existence, for Socrates; and aesthetics, as Plato later demonstrated in the Republic, is the handmaiden of comprehension. (BT, 15, p. 96)
How did Socrates effect this revolution? Basically, it was by way of a metaphysical revolution. Working within the rising secularism and skepticism of late 5th Century Athens, Socrates searched for the bases of truth that lay behind Greek classic culture. But since it could no longer be found in myth and poetry and experience of divine mystery, it must lie somehow embedded in true conceptions. Plato continued the Socratic quest through dialectic to the theoretical/metaphysical conclusion that the universal reality is a realm of Ideas in which worldly things gather their meanings by "participation." Both the Apollinian and the Dionysian worlds were put aside --- the former as an incomprehensible illusion and the latter as a false conception of reality. Not only did Plato view these Ideas as the ultimate realities, but he asserted that each individual is an immortal knower of these Ideas. Life, as it turns out, is a confusing illusion, and death returns the individual to the true home amidst the ideas, where they can be seen and understood clearly. The principle of individuation reigns supreme here. In Apollo it was an heroic, artistic construction; in Socrates and Plato it is ultimate reality.
The modern world is not Socratic, of course, because it has moved into diverse philosophical positions. However, science has been a dominant force in the modern world and Nietzsche sees Socrates as the father of science. In fact, Socrates is the father of "theoretical man" as such. The principle is that there is an intelligible union of cause-and-effect between universal reality and the experienced world. Modern theory formation is led on by the optimism that we will understand all; and one might note that modern technology is led on by the optimism that we can control all. Deepest reality and human purposes are reconciled, in this view, through an ever-improving comprehension of the theoretical micro-structure of all that is. [Note: Certainly Nietzsche's assessment of 19th Century scientific optimism was correct, but 20th Century Quantum and Relativity Theories have done much to question this. Somehow, inspite of the re-manifestation of Dionysus in physical science, however, technological optimism seems to race forward, unaffected.]
The theoretical mood is similar to the Homeric mood in its optimism and constructive thrust. Its chief difference is the absence of art, indeed, the antagonism toward art. The Homeric mood is aesthetic, granted, naively aesthetic; but the theoretical mood is conceptualizing and argumentative. But foremost, the Homeric world affirmed life by replicating and "justifying" it in the lives of the gods. The theoretical world displaces human life from the causal realm and belittles it as mere effects. Humankind's "heroism" is only as the knower and not as the actor. We are left only the spiteful "joy" of overcoming the rest of nature by application of our knowledge of causes.
Nietzsche moves into a vitriolic critique of 19th Century arts, especially opera, which he sees as the only obvious art form suited to the theoretical mood. Why? Because opera is really language accompanied by music. And recitative worst of all is language not sung but spoken so that we can be sure to understand clearly! Music, whose destiny, if we believe Schopenhauer, was to be the one true and direct experience of universal realities, has been shackled by the mind and thrown into the background in opera. [NOTE: There is a lot to remember here. Nietzsche himself is a frustrated philologist (scholar of language) who is struggling to understand the musician in himself. But also, the opera of the first half-century was designed to please an aristocratic urban audience and was a poorly developed art form.]
There will be a re-birth of tragic art. Nietzsche is more sure about the fact than about the cause or pathology. The fact is that Wagner's operatic program is that re-birth. Perhaps the pathology is best explained by Freud's dichotomy of eros and thanatos. All organisms, Freud thought, have both the constructive and the destructive themes within them; in normal development, the constructive theme dominates early on until the destructive theme overrides it. It is not possible for optimism to prevail unchecked for ever; the pessimistic will emerge; we should hope that it emerges within the healing tragic mood.
This period is the high-water mark of Nietzsche's faith in Germany. [One should remember that the Franco-Prussian War is recent history.] Within the unification of German peoples he imagines the German spirit coming together in the creation of a new great culture. Of course, it is precisely the possibility of cultural evolution, accompanying political evolution, that Wagner's ambitious program depends upon. Little has yet been realized; Nietzsche's faith, here, is all possibilities. [In Human, All-too-Human we will see what those possibilities came to.] One of the more interesting aspects of this infatuation with the German spirit is Nietzsche's observation that the German stock is different from the Greek and, hence, was never diverted by Socratism, or Alexandrianism. It is as though the tragic spirit can emerge naturally within Germany because the German people never suffered the "original sin" of Alexandrianism.
Nietzsche ends with a powerful argument for the role of myth. "Without myth every culture loses the healthy natural power of its creativity: only a horizon defined by myths completes and unifies a whole cultural movement. Myth alone saves all the powers of the imagination and of the Apollinian dream from their aimless wanderings. . . Even the state knows no more powerful unwritten laws than the mythical foundation . . ." (BT, 23, p. 135) And, of course, one of the proudest boasts of the scientific spirit is that "it puts myth to rest" --- that is, disproves and destroys it.
In the end, he also returns to his metaphysical thesis regarding art. "That life is really so tragic would least of all explain the origin of an art form --- assuming that art is not merely imitation of the reality of nature but rather a metaphysical supplement of the reality of nature, placed beside it for its overcoming. The tragic myth, too, in so far as it belongs to arts at all, participates fully in this metaphysical intention of art to transfigure." (BT, 24, p. 140, my emphasis) Human health lies in art, tragic art in particular; and this alone is the deep metaphysical embrace that resolves the opposition of Apollo and Dionysus and justifies existence aesthetically.
[In preparing this essay, I have used material from Carl Pletsch. Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius (Free Press, 1991) and Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche. The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence (New York: Liveright, 1921).]
copyright 1995, 1998 by Tad Beckman
