The Birth of Tragedy

[Wenty]

Been ever so slowly working my way through this book for a while.

I'm not a big fan of it at the moment, the prose isn't all that good and i'm finding the text hard to understand.

Does anyone want to comment on what they thought of it and/or mention criticisms or even a greater clarification on some key ideas.

Thanks.

[Pedro Alonso Lopez]

Hello Wenty,this is taken from one of my essays this year on Nietzsche and aesthetics. Some of it was not related to BoT so I have taken it out, so if it seems a little disjointed that probably why.

As for my own reading, it took me quite a while to enjoy the book. I appreaciated it more after doing a course on aesthetics from Kant to Nietzsche incorporating Hegel.

It is difficult, I did begin to understand it after a second reading but I did a third for the essay and it was fine. Nietzsche is always a little cryptic anyway. The prose actually sounds good if you read it aloud, my lecturer told me its what Jim Morrision would do in his UCLA days (its where his Dionysus obsession comes from).

It is influential in my eyes more than people realise but at heart it is a romantics book that wants to criticise Victorian values (not English but the general values that had found themselves infecting europe.

Anyway my essay:

Nietzsche begins this great work by twinning two principles which he represents by the Greek deities Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo represents for Nietzsche the principles of order, reason and harmony viewed in art as inanimate objects for example a statue. Dionysus stands opposed representing chaos, drunkenness and revelry viewed in art as flowing most commonly associated with music. Nietzsche attempts to show that we must in order to live find a balance between the two by uniting the vulnerability of the individual (Apollo) with the larger world (Dionysus). Greek tragedy becomes the examined culture in the Birth of Tragedy for in Greek art the focus is upon the vulnerability if the individual for example Oedipus of the Greek theatre. It was with the chorous that a Dionysian element was introduced incorporating the individual into the frenzied audience. The vulnerability of the individual was thus quashed and a sense of affirmation in life was aroused. In Nietzsche’s words ‘It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the eternal world are eternally justified’ . This was a healthy balance between reason and chaos, for Nietzsche a healthy culture means a healthy individual but of course this was not to last.


The audience with the introduction of the chorus would be in such frenzy before the play began that when the actor appeared he would appear like Dionysus personified. In other words the vulnerable individual was no more. However the Apollonian nature of the theatre soon took over and began to lessen the Dionysian elements that existed. Euripides reinstated the dominance of the Apollonian into theatre and Nietzsche concluded that it must be down to Socrates. Socrates though quite clearly a great thinker sent the world along the direction of Apollonian thought. This thought is very provoking, society has become so dependant on reason that we have come to believe that it can solve all of our problems. Culture according to Nietzsche has become unhealthy because of this decline. Can reason solve the problems of morality or individual vulnerability? This is the question he asks us and the answer is daunting

This manifests itself in modern culture and scholarship. For in Nietzsche’s own day the Birth of Tragedy was rejected and this can probably be attributed to a general disregard for reason in an age of scientific advancement. This work could be viewed as anti-scientific which is a theme not at all missing from much of Nietzsche’s work. The question thus arises as to whether we have become more ‘Nietzschen’ for want of a better term. It seems unlikely that we have managed to find a balance between the Apollonian and Dionysian; in fact it is obvious that we have sunk further into our dependence on reason. We now more than ever need the cultural physician to remind us that we have allowed reason to render ‘the modern individual oblivious to the Dionysian character of reality’ .

Nietzsche does not consider myths as just imitations of life like Socrates who dismissed art as a counterfeit substitute for life. They are the capturing of a mood or a way we live. Nietzsche links art with culture and if our art is infected then so is out culture.

For Nietzsche music is the origin of the myth, everything gains a higher significance when it is under the influence of music. Music forces us to face the terrible truth of individual vulnerability, of existing as an individual who is destined to die. Nietzsche’s diagnosis for Greek tragedy is that it has lost its message because it has lost its music. Clearly Nietzsche placed a lot of faith in music as a Dionysian spirit to restore the balance. Like Schopenhauer his influence Nietzsche saw music as the aesthetic ideal.
How music is Dionysian is hard to explain but in an essay on Wittengenstein Roger Scruton inadvertently puts it perfectly:

We cannot find the meaning of a piece of music by looking inwards…To give a full account of the musical understanding, therefore, we must go beyond Wittengensteins laconic comparison with the recognition of facial expressions. We must see music as an art of communication, which crucially depends upon placing within the listeners first person perspective, a state of mind that is not his own.

Music is thus the Dionysian element of Greek Theatre that makes tragedy the embodiment of the aesthetic. Since it is through this aesthetic that life is affirmed art becomes subservient to life or to the will. Moving away from the Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche’s notion of the aesthetic justified in this work is taken further. By the time we get to his unpublished work, The Will to Power Nietzsche has painted a view of the aesthetic as almost a biological principle. It is the protector of life he assets. To back up his claims of the aesthetic as somehow biological of Nietzsche challenges past views of aesthetics by Kant and Hegel by looming at taste as a form of aesthetics’. This is a radical change from Kantian aesthetics especially the notion of disinterestedness. Nietzsche’s aesthetics are for the man who takes everything in a balanced way. He does not have to purge his reason to contemplate art.

End

I hope this helps somewhat.

[elijahcraig]

This may be my favorite work by Nietzsche.

It gave me some very good theory work for my essay on Hamlet. Harold Bloom also uses it in his theories on Hamlet.

[Wenty]

thanks Geist, was very helpful.

[peaccenicked]

Nietsche is rather full when it comes to forms but rather empty when it comes to content. He is all things to all indiviualists in that he can express the form of liberty.
The content of social solidarity is well beyond him. His aestheticism is like emperors clothes.

"Nietzsche’s aesthetics are for the man who takes everything in a balanced way. He does not have to purge his reason to contemplate art. "
'Balance' is merely a form not a reality. A subjective nirvana based on an idealisation of the 'self' as an asocial form. He does not have the starting point of really existing social relationships.
Therefore his contemplation of art is at least ambiguous and devoid of elementary human values such as the promotion of decency, love, trust; and this can be as such, an atomistic argument against the meta-narrative essential to living socialism {even though this in itself might appear at this moment a marginalised insignificance}

[Pedro Alonso Lopez]

Originally posted by [email protected] 6 2004, 11:32 PM
Nietsche is rather full when it comes to forms but rather empty when it comes to content. He is all things to all indiviualists in that he can express the form of liberty.
The content of social solidarity is well beyond him. His aestheticism is like emperors clothes.

"Nietzsche’s aesthetics are for the man who takes everything in a balanced way. He does not have to purge his reason to contemplate art. "
'Balance' is merely a form not a reality. A subjective nirvana based on an idealisation of the 'self' as an asocial form. He does not have the starting point of really existing social relationships.
Therefore his contemplation of art is at least ambiguous and devoid of elementary human values such as the promotion of decency, love, trust; and this can be as such, an atomistic argument against the meta-narrative essential to living socialism {even though this in itself might appear at this moment a marginalised insignificance}

What do you mean he is devoid of content, he is intentionally being so! He is avoiding an aesthetic system because he believes aesthetics has become too overdependant on reason. I think you may have misunderstood what he was trying to do, I can get into this more but I think you may have misunderstood him rather than actually hold that point of view.

The Dionysian is a directly anti-individualist concept, once again, Im not to sure where you got this from?

The rest of your post makes little sense.