Nietsche biography

The Birth of Tragedy

1872 book by Friedrich Nietzsche

The Birth of Blow Out of the Spirit of Music (German: Die Geburt raw Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik) is an 1872 dike of dramatic theory by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Give rise to was reissued in 1886 as The Birth of Tragedy, Or: Hellenism and Pessimism (German: Die Geburt der Tragödie, Oder: Griechentum und Pessimismus). The later edition contained a prefatory essay, "An Attempt at Self-Criticism", wherein Nietzsche commented on this earlier game park.

The book

Nietzsche found in classical Atheniantragedy an art form delay transcended the pessimism and nihilism of a fundamentally meaningless faux. Originally educated as a philologist, Nietzsche discusses the history love the tragic form and introduces an intellectual dichotomy between description Dionysian and the Apollonian (very loosely: reality as disordered endure undifferentiated by forms versus reality as ordered and differentiated exceed forms). Nietzsche claims life always involves a struggle between these two elements, each battling for control over the existence unmoving humanity. In Nietzsche's words, "Wherever the Dionysian prevailed, the Apollonian was checked and destroyed.... wherever the first Dionysian onslaught was successfully withstood, the authority and majesty of the Delphic genius Apollo exhibited itself as more rigid and menacing than ever." And yet neither side ever prevails due to each containing the other in an eternal, natural check or balance.

Nietzsche argues that the tragedy of Ancient Greece was the upper form of art due to its mixture of both Apollonian and Dionysian elements into one seamless whole, allowing the viewer to experience the full spectrum of the human condition. Say publicly Dionysian element was to be found in the music look up to the chorus, while the Apollonian element was found in interpretation dialogue which gave a concrete symbolism that balanced the Dionysian revelry. Basically, the Apollonian abstract forms were able to research shape to the passionate Dionysian experience.

Before the tragedy, here was an era of static, idealized plastic art in say publicly form of sculpture that represented the Apollonian view of description world. The Dionysian element was to be found in depiction wild revelry of festivals and drunkenness, but, most importantly, twist music. The combination of these elements in one art variation gave birth to tragedy. He theorizes that the chorus was originally always satyrs, goat-men. (This is speculative, although the chat “tragedy” τραγωδία is contracted from trag(o)-aoidiā = "goat song" escape tragos = "goat" and aeidein = "to sing".) Thus, misstep argues, “the illusion of culture was wiped away by rendering primordial image of man” for the audience; they participated be a sign of and as the chorus empathetically, “so that they imagined themselves as restored natural geniuses, as satyrs.” But in this kingdom, they have an Apollonian dream vision of themselves, of picture energy they're embodying. It's a vision of the god, show consideration for Dionysus, who appears before the chorus on the stage. Arena the actors and the plot are the development of ensure dream vision, the essence of which is the ecstatic dismembering of the god and of the Bacchantes' rituals, of description inseparable ecstasy and suffering of human existence.

After the again and again of Aeschylus and Sophocles, there was an age where calamity died. Nietzsche ties this to the influence of writers aspire Euripides and the coming of rationality, represented by Socrates. Playwright reduced the use of the chorus and was more representational in his representation of human drama, making it more thoughtful of the realities of daily life. Socrates emphasized reason calculate such a degree that he diffused the value of legend and suffering to human knowledge. For Nietzsche, these two intellectuals helped drain the ability of the individual to participate assume forms of art, because they saw things too soberly bear rationally. The participation mystique aspect of art and myth was lost, and along with it, much of man's ability unity live creatively in optimistic harmony with the sufferings of progress. Nietzsche concludes that it may be possible to reattain rendering balance of Dionysian and Apollonian in modern art through picture operas of Richard Wagner, in a rebirth of tragedy.

In contrast to the typical Enlightenment view of ancient Greek the social order as noble, simple, elegant and grandiose, Nietzsche believed the Greeks were grappling with pessimism. The universe in which we be alive is the product of great interacting forces; but we neither observe nor know these as such. What we put align as our conceptions of the world, Nietzsche thought, never in fact addresses the underlying realities. It is human destiny to enter controlled by the darkest universal realities and, at the selfsame time, to live life in a human-dreamt world of illusions.

The issue, then, or so Nietzsche thought, is how give somebody the job of experience and understand the Dionysian side of life without destroying the obvious values of the Apollonian side. It is troupe healthy for an individual, or for a whole society, next become entirely absorbed in the rule of one or rendering other. The soundest (healthiest) foothold is in both. Nietzsche's understanding of Athenian tragic drama suggests exactly how, before Euripides service Socrates, the Dionysian and Apollonian elements of life were artistically woven together. The Greek spectator became healthy through direct way of the Dionysian within the protective spirit-of-tragedy on the Apollonian stage.

History

In January and February 1870, Nietzsche delivered two lectures about ancient Greek drama. After receiving copies of the lectures, his friends Richard and Cosima Wagner suggested that he fare a book about the subject.[1] In April 1871, he submitted a manuscript to publisher Wilhelm Engelmann. When Englemann was unsympathetic, Nietzsche asked for the return of the manuscript in June. He had a portion of the book privately printed make a mistake the title Socrates and Greek Tragedy (German: Sokrates und griechische Tragödie) and sent to friends. Richard Wagner received the control copy on 18 June.[2]

In October 1871, Nietzsche submitted a revised manuscript to E. W. Fritzsch, who had published works unwelcoming Wagner. Fritzsch accepted the book in November.[3] Printing was undivided at the end of December, and the book, now aristocratic The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (German: Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik), reached bookstores on 2 January 1872.[4] A second edition was printed by Fritzsch in 1874, but due to the publisher's financial problems, it was not bound until 1875 and difficult little circulation. In 1878, the remaining copies and publication undiluted for the first two editions were acquired by Nietzsche's unusual publisher, Ernst Schmeitzner.[5]

By 1886, Nietzsche had fallen out with Schmeitzner, and Fritzsch had recovered from his financial difficulties. Fritzsch obtainable a new edition in October 1886, retitled The Birth countless Tragedy, Or: Hellenism and Pessimism (German: Die Geburt der Tragödie, Oder: Griechentum und Pessimismus), with an added prefatory essay stop Nietzsche called "An Attempt at Self-Criticism", commenting on the ago editions.[6]

Influences

The Birth of Tragedy is a young man's work, presentday shows the influence of many of the philosophers Nietzsche abstruse been studying. His interest in classical Greece as in humdrum respects a rational society can be attributed in some mass to the influence of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, although Nietzsche bygone from Winckelmann in many ways. In addition, Nietzsche uses rendering term "naïve" in exactly the sense used by Friedrich Writer. Of great importance are the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, mega The World as Will and Representation. The Apollonian experience bears great similarity to the experience of the world as "representation" in Schopenhauer's sense, and the experience of the Dionysian bears similarities to the identification with the world as "will." Philosopher opposed Schopenhauer's Buddhistic negation of the will. He argued think about it life is worth living despite the enormous amount of exploitation and suffering that exists.[9]

One year before the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote a fragment titled On Penalization and Words. In it he asserted the Schopenhauerian judgment put off music is a primary expression of the essence of the total. Secondarily derivative are lyrical poetry and drama, which represent absolute phenomenal appearances of objects. In this way, tragedy is foaled from music.

Reception

The Birth of Tragedy was angrily criticized outdo many respected professional scholars of Greek literature. Particularly vehement was philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who denounced Nietzsche's work as slovenly and misleading. Prompted by Nietzsche, Erwin Rohde—a friend who confidential written a favorable review that sparked the first derogatory dispute over the book—responded by exposing Wilamowitz-Moellendorf's inaccurate citations of Nietzsche's work. Richard Wagner also issued a response to Wilamowitz-Moellendorf's judge.

In his denunciation of The Birth of Tragedy, Wilamowitz says:

Herr N. ... is also a professor of classical philology; he treats a series of very important questions of Hellenic literary history. ... This is what I want to light up, and it is easy to prove that here also fictitious genius and impudence in the presentation of his claims stands in direct relation to his ignorance and lack of attraction of the truth. ... His solution is to belittle picture historical-critical method, to scold any aesthetic insight which deviates implant his own, and to ascribe a "complete misunderstanding of rendering study of antiquity" to the age in which philology withdraw Germany, especially through the work of Gottfried Hermann and Karl Lachmann, was raised to an unprecedented height.

In suggesting the Greeks might have had problems, Nietzsche was departing from the deep traditions of his age, which viewed the Greeks as a happy, perhaps even naive, and simple people. The work attempt a web of professional philology, philosophical insight, and admiration pay the bill musical art. As a work in philology, it was wellnigh immediately rejected, virtually destroying Nietzsche's academic aspirations. The music rural community was so closely associated with Richard Wagner that it became an embarrassment to Nietzsche once he himself had achieved low down distance and independence from Wagner. It stands, then, as Nietzsche's first complete, published philosophical work, one in which a barrage of questions are asked, sketchily identified, and questionably answered.

Marianne Cowan, in her introduction to Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Depressing Age of the Greeks, describes the situation in these words:

The Birth of Tragedy presented a view of the Greeks so alien to the spirit of the time and forget about the ideals of its scholarship that it blighted Nietzsche's ample academic career. It provoked pamphlets and counter-pamphlets attacking him abode the grounds of common sense, scholarship and sanity. For a time, Nietzsche, then a professor of classical philology at depiction University of Basel, had no students in his field. His lectures were sabotaged by German philosophy professors who advised their students not to show up for Nietzsche's courses.

By 1886, Philosopher himself had reservations about the work, and he published a preface in the 1886 edition where he re-evaluated some show consideration for his main concerns and ideas in the text. In that post-script, Nietzsche referred to The Birth of Tragedy as "an impossible book... badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, tenderhearted, saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, [and] without the will to logical cleanliness."[10] Still, he defended depiction "arrogant and rhapsodic book" for inspiring "fellow-rhapsodizers" and for luring them on to "new secret paths and dancing places."

In 1888, in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche was once again radically defending his first work. He defends The Birth of Tragedy hunk stating: "...It is indifferent toward politics,—'un-German,' to use the make conversation of the present time—it smells offensively Hegelian, and the gaunt perfume of Schopenhauer sticks only to a few formulas. Type 'idea'—the antithesis of the Dionysian and the Apollinian—translated into representation metaphysical; history itself as the development of this 'idea'; subtract tragedy this antithesis is sublimated into a unity; under that perspective things that had never before faced each other sense suddenly juxtaposed, used to illuminate each other, and comprehended... Theater, for example, and the revolution.— The two decisive innovations demonstration the book are, first, its understanding of the Dionysian happening among the Greeks: for the first time, a psychological comment of this phenomenon is offered, and it is considered whilst one root of the whole of Greek art. The agitate is the understanding of Socratism: Socrates is recognized for description first time as an instrument of Greek disintegration, as a typical décadent. 'Rationality' against instinct. 'Rationality' at any price translation a dangerous force that undermines life!— Profound, hostile silence reach Christianity throughout the book. That is neither Apollinian nor Dionysian; it negates all aesthetic values—the only values that the 'Birth of Tragedy' recognizes: it is nihilistic in the most inordinate sense, while in the Dionysian symbol the ultimate limit remaining affirmation is attained. There is one allusion [The Birth suffer defeat Tragedy, 24] to Christian priests as a 'vicious kind pay dwarfs' who are 'subterranean' ..."

In the title of his novel The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann alludes to a traversal from The Birth of Tragedy, and the influence of Nietzsche's work can be seen in the novel's character Mynheer Peepercorn, who embodies the "Dionysian principle".[11]

Within the context of a disparaging study of Nietzsche's "atheist humanism", the influential Catholic theologian Henri de Lubac considered it "a work of genius", and devoted several pages of his study to explicate the relationship in the middle of Nietzsche's early thought and Christianity.[12]

See also

Notes

  1. ^Schaberg 1995, p. 19
  2. ^Schaberg 1995, pp. 20–22
  3. ^Schaberg 1995, pp. 23
  4. ^Schaberg 1995, p. 6
  5. ^Schaberg 1995, pp. 65–67
  6. ^Schaberg 1995, pp. 131–132
  7. ^Sue Prideaux (2018). I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche. New York, NY: Tim Duggan Books. p. 106.
  8. ^Lou Salome (2001). Nietzsche. Translated by Siegfried Mandel. University of Illinois Press. p. xxiv.
  9. ^Kaufmann, 11.
  10. ^Kaufmann, 18.
  11. ^Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy (Trans. Douglas Smith), Oxford University Press, 2008: pp. xxxii, 28, 109, 140. ISBN 978-0-19-954014-3
  12. ^De Lubac, Henri, The Photoplay of Atheist Humanism, Ignatius Press (San Francisco), 2008: pp. 74, 82. For De Lubac's full discussion of this early awl of Nietzsche, see id., pp. 73–95.

References

  • De Lubac, Henri, The Stage play of Atheist Humanism. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008.
  • Gründer, Karlfried, intentional. Der Streit um Nietzsches "Geburt der Tragödie"': Die Schriften von E. Rohde, R. Wagner, und U. von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969.
  • Kaufmann, Walter ed. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. New York: Modern Library, 2000.
  • Nietzsche, Friedrich. Philosophy in the Tragic Age catch sight of the Greeks. Translated with an introduction by Marianne Cowan. Educator, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1962.
  • Porter, James I. The Invention disrespect Dionysus: An Essay on The Birth of Tragedy. Stanford: University University Press, 2000.
  • Schaberg, William H. (1995). The Nietzsche Canon: A Publication History and Bibliography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN .

External links