Nietzsche on Tragedy

1
Nietzsche on Tragedy

• The Birth of Tragedy
• Ch. 1-3, 7, 12-15

2

• 1. Note that N is investigating the origins of
  Greek (Attic) tragedy but in fact his book will
  also give an account of its death
• and, then, of its possible re-birth in
  Wagners operas.

3

• 2. Note that his account, in a way that parallels
  that of Aristotle, also traces the origins of
  poetry/tragedy to a fundamental human drive. In
  Ari, that was mimesis in N, it is the conflict
  between two opposing drives, which he names after
  two Greek gods Apollo and Dionysos.

4

• Apollo god of, among other things, music, poetry
  and prophecy. He represents harmony, order and
  reason.
• Dionysos god of wine, intoxication and
  ecstasy/frenzy.

5

• Ns central thesis about tragedy, and its
  origin draws on this claim
• that the continuous evolution of art is bound
  up with the duality of the Apolline and Dionysiac
  in much the same way as reproduction depends on
  there being two sexes (1, p.14)

6

• The two Greek Gods, Apollo and Dionysos,
  represent an enormous opposition, both in origin
  and goals, between the Apolline art of the
  image-maker or sculptor, and the imageless art of
  music, which is that of Dionysos (p.14)

7

• These two very different drives exist side by
  side, mostly in open conflict, stimulating and
  provoking one another to give birth to ever-new,
  more vigorous offspringuntil they finally
  engender a work of art which is Dionysiac and
  Apolline in equal measure Attic tragedy. (p.14)

8

• In order to gain a closer understanding of these
  two drives, let us think of them in the first
  place as the separate art-worlds of dream and
  intoxication (p.14)
• Apollo is the god of all image-making energies
  and of prophecy. (p.16)
• He is the magnificent divine image of the
  principium individuationis (p.17)

9

• In contrast, there is a certain horror which
  seizes people when they begin to lose faith in
  this principle.
• AND, If we add to this horror the blissful
  ecstasy which arises from the innermost ground of
  man, indeed of nature itself, whenever this
  breakdown of the principium individuationis
  occurs, we catch a glimpse of the essence of the
  Dionysiac, which is best conveyed by the analogy
  of intoxication. (p.17)

10

• These Dionysiac stirrings, which, as they grow
  in intensity, cause subjectivity to vanish to the
  point of complete self-forgetting, awaken either
  under the influence of narcotic drinkor at the
  approach of spring when the whole of nature is
  pervaded by lust for life. (p.17)

11

• In the Dionysiac ecstasy, Man is no longer an
  artist, he has become a work of art all natures
  artistic power reveals itself here, amidst
  shivers of intoxication, to the highest, most
  blissful satisfaction of the primordial unity.
  (p.18)

12
Ch.2

• How do these fundamental drives which N calls
  artistic powers which erupt from nature itself
  (p.19) how do they relate to the work of
  individual human artists?
• First of all, everybody participates (or can) in
  these drives most easily in dream (Appoline)
  and ecstasy (Dionysiac).

13

• N suggests that in the development of music, the
  two tendencies are clearly in conflict contrast
  between Apolline music (ordered, individual) and
  Dionysiac music which elicited terror and horror
  from them. (p.21)
• In the Dionysiac dithyramb man is stimulated to
  the highest intensification of his symbolic
  powers something that he has never felt before
  urgently demands to be expressed the destruction
  of the veil of maya, one-ness as the genius of
  mankind, indeed of nature itself. (p.21)

14
Ch.3

• But this Dionysiac drive was always there, below
  the surface of Apolline Greek culture we just
  need to know how to see it.
• Even the Greek Olympian religion was nothing to
  do with asceticism, moral duty, spirituality,
  etc. In fact, everything here speaks only of
  over-brimming, indeed triumphant existence, where
  everything that exists has been deified,
  regardless of whether it is good or evil. (p.22)

15

• The story of the encounter between Midas and
  Silenus
• The very best thing is utterly beyond your
  reach not to have been born, not to be, to be
  nothing. However, the second best thing for you
  is to die soon (p.23)

16

• The Greeks knew and felt the terrors and horrors
  of existence in order to live at all they had to
  place in front of these things the resplendent,
  dream-born figures of the Olympians. (p.23)
• How else could that people have borne existence,
  given their extreme sensitivity, their stormy
  desires, their unique gift for suffering, if that
  same existence had not been shown to them in
  their gods, suffused with a higher glory? (23-24)

17

• In Ch.5 on the aesthetic justification of
  existence
• the whole comedy of art is certainly not
  performed for us, neither for our edification nor
  our education, just as we are far from truly
  being the creators of that world of art
  conversely, however, we may very well assume we
  are already images and artistic projections for
  the true creator of art, and that our highest
  dignity lies in our significance as works of art
  for only as an aesthetic phenomenon is
  existence and the world eternally justified
  (32-33).

18
Ch.7

• So, what is the origin of tragedy? At one level,
  it is the tragic chorus tragedy arose from the
  tragic chorus and was originally chorus and
  nothing but chorus (p.36).
• But, what is the significance of the chorus?

19

• The introduction of the chorus was the decisive
  step by which war was declared openly and
  honestly on all naturalism in art. (38)
• Tragedy grew up on this foundation, and for this
  very reason, of course, was relieved from the
  very outset of any need to copy reality with
  painful exactness. (p.39)

20

• But, it is not unrelated to our reality. In fact
• The metaphysical solace which, I wish to
  suggest, we derive from every true tragedy, the
  solace that in the ground of things, and despite
  all changing appearances, life is indestructibly
  mighty and pleasurable, this solace appears with
  palpable clarity in the chorus of satyrs, a
  chorus of natural beings whose life goes on
  ineradicably behind and beyond all civilisation
  (p.39)

21

• Gazing into the suffering and destructive havoc
  of the world, the Greek audience is in danger of
  longing to deny the will as the Buddhist does.
  Art saves him, and through art life saves him
  for itself. (p.40)

22

• The litany of suffering and destruction tends to
  make us give up on action, on will after all,
  whats the point of trying against such odds?
• BUT Here, at this moment of supreme danger for
  the will, art approaches as a saving sorceress
  with the power to heal

23

• Art alone can re-direct those repulsive thoughts
  about the terrible or absurd nature of existence
  into representations with which man can live
  these representations are the sublime, whereby
  the terrible is tamed by artistic means, and the
  comical, whereby disgust at absurdity is
  discharged by artistic means

24

• The dithyrambs chorus of satyrs is the saving
  act of Greek art the attacks of revulsion
  described above spent themselves in contemplation
  of the intermediate world of these Dionysiac
  companions. (p.40)