While Nietzsche came to regret many aspects of his book The Birth of Tragedy, it remains clear that numerous ideas in this book were central to his long-term philosophical projects. The truly regrettable part of the book was his passionate relationship with Wagner and the degree to which he was willing to commit to Wagner as the savior of German culture. Even within this passionate commitment, however, there is much to be learned. While Wagner as a person came to disappoint Nietzsche profoundly, the fundamentals of Nietzsche's aims remained thoroughly in tact. Wagner's great sin lay in failing to meet Nietzsche's expectations. Germany did the same, by the way. Not only had Nietzsche given up his Prussian citizenship to take his position in Basle, but throughout his remaining years he became an uncompromising critic of German culture and German people. [In a letter to his mother, Nietzsche wrote, "for, even if I should be a bad German, I am at all events a very good European."]
Nietzsche's vision of the Apollinian is the beginning point for his entire understanding of Western metaphysics. The Apollinian impulse is a dream! An illusion! The principle of individuation, which he sees as the underlying principle of Apollo, lies at the bottom of all our perspectives on reality. We also have to take quite seriously the connection that Nietzsche places between the Apollinian and the Socratic. Socrates, after all, is the father of all Western philosophy. And through the Gnostic continuation of Socrates the West brought Christianity into its particular theoretical dispositions. For Nietzsche, Socrates is even the founding disposition of Western science. [While we tend to honor Aristotle's empiricism as the founding of science, I think that Nietzsche is quite correct in identifying Socrates's displacement of the real into the imagined Ideas as the true foundation of theoretical science.] All Western metaphysics revolves around these two products of Socratic philosophy --- Christian religion and science.
Equally important, of course, is the vision of the Dionysian that Nietzsche was beginning to work out and that continued to inspire his work right to the end. Unlike the Apollinian, the Dionysian did address universal reality; and, at this point in his life, Nietzsche was willing to follow Schopenhauer and Wagner in believing that a certain kind of music was our only genuine mode of perceiving the universally real. The importance of this concept for understanding Nietzsche ultimately is our recognition that this music does not "perceive" objects or individuals. While objectification is commonplace in Western metaphysics, Nietzsche was already replacing Western metaphysics with a chaotic undifferentiated "energy" which is closely related to the word 'will' as he uses it. [It is easy to believe that Nietzsche's use of the term 'will' is merely a subscription to Schopenhauer's philosophy, but it is important to consider the different slant that Nietzsche was already giving this term --- a term that will ultimately become elevated within his conception of "will to power."]
There is an interesting "urgency" to Nietzsche's book and I suspect this is the same urgency that continued to fire his writing in occasionally excessive dramatizations. The origin of this urgency was undoubtedly personal and it is easy to suspect that it had a great deal to do with his all-too-frequently stifled attempts to overcome the passive and compliant Lutheranism of his mother and sister. That urgency, so far as it can be seen in both readings, here, was a vision that Athenians needed tragic art and lost something of considerable (perhaps inestimable) value when Socratism and Hellenism took over. In the essay on Wagner, we see it again as a need for German cultural "health." I see this urgency as connected with the dramatic urgency that we see expressed in all of Nietzsche's later writings. He is writing "before his time," as he says, always paving the way for something important. He is "dynamite." For all of the energy involved in this tendency to urgency, however, we are left wondering whether he ever does tell us why the Greeks cannot just live in simple Apollinian bliss. Similarly, what is wrong with being a fundamentalist Christian if you're happy? Where does scientific optimism really go wrong?
One suspects that the answers to these questions lie, at least in part, in psychology; and that is one clear reason why Nietzsche wrote speculatively in psychology so extensively that he anticipated Freud and other great 20th Century analysts. In many respects, we encounter the same problems among them. "What's wrong with a little neurosis if it keeps me happy? Maybe, in fact, I'm in love with my neuroses!"
Freud's Future of an Illusion must seem especially relevant here. As he put it, "every individual is virtually an enemy of civilization." Civilizations have to defend themselves in order to create long-term stability, hence, all the rules and regulations that are created to maintain civilization. But this means that individuals must renounce instinctual aims and activities in order to conform. Our Apollinian illusions require conformity, ultimately; and there's the rub. Freud even agrees with Nietzsche about the fact that, "art offers substitutive satisfactions for the oldest and still most deeply felt cultural renunciations, and for that reason it serves as nothing else does to reconcile a man to the sacrifices he has made on behalf of civilization." Like Nietzsche, Freud admired the many positive contributions of civilization to human life. Neither complete surrender to the Id nor dissolution into Dionysian intoxication is a productive direction for human existence. But why, then, is the other side of the dichotomy forbidden as well? The purely Apollinian is as dangerous to us as the purely Dionysian life. The dichotomy must be bridged and escaped in some way; and this is a theme that virtually characterizes all of Nietzsche's thought.
Apollinian civilization is built on individuals, words and objects. But, in an odd way, it is simultaneously destructive to individuals, that is, to real individuals, not ideal individuals. It is the real individual to which Freud makes reference, namely, a combination of conscious and unconscious, ego and id. Much of the confusion over Nietzsche's thought must revolve around trying to understand what the "real individual" is in Nietzsche's mind. This is crucial because "health" or "joy" or "life" all stand in relation to that description. We cannot describe joyous human life if we remain captured by Apollinian preconceptions of individuality. In section 23, he makes this point in terms of the nurturing of myth. Human vitality remains in tact when human life remains founded in myth. Perhaps an understandable example is the difference between a national spirit that has acquired a "realist" perspective on its political state versus one that continues to take seriously its founding myths. The mythic addresses deep and pervasive struggles of a people and remains indefinite and evolutionary. The "realistic" addresses the particular in a closed and analytic formulation, leaving little opportunity for transformation. Presumably, the purely Apollinian person is tied into a concrete world, whereas the "tragic person," encompassing both Apollinian and Dionysian, admits the possibility of transformative change from one concreteness to another. This represents a kind of heroic "vitality" that, one imagines, will ultimately be represented by Nietzsche's Ubermensch.