Not in order to get rid of terror
and pity, not to purify from a dangerous passion
by its vehement discharge (it was thus that
Aristotle misunderstood it); but, beyond terror
and pity, to realise in fact the eternal delight of
becoming, that delight which even involves in itself
the joy of annihilating.
and pity, not to purify from a dangerous passion
by its vehement discharge (it was thus that
Aristotle misunderstood it); but, beyond terror
and pity, to realise in fact the eternal delight of
becoming, that delight which even involves in itself
the joy of annihilating.
Nietzsche - v01 - Birth of Tragedy
170 (#214) ############################################
\JO THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
while they are indefatigable in characterising the
struggle of the hero with fate, the triumph of the
moral order of the world, or the disburdenment of
the emotions through tragedy, as the properly
Tragic: an indefatigableness which makes me think
that they are perhaps not aesthetically excitable
men at all, but only to be regarded as moral
beings when hearing tragedy. Never since Aris-
totle has an explanation of the tragic effect been
proposed, by which an aesthetic activity of the
hearer could be inferred from artistic circumstances.
At one time fear and pity are supposed to be forced
to an alleviating discharge through the serious pro-
cedure, at another time we are expected to feel
elevated and inspired at the triumph of good and
noble principles, at the sacrifice of the hero in the
interest of a moral conception of things; and how-
ever certainly I believe that for countless men
precisely this, and only this, is the effect of tragedy,
it as obviously follows therefrom that all these,
together with their interpreting aesthetes, have had
no experience of tragedy as the highest art. The
pathological discharge, the catharsis of Aristotle,
which philologists are at a loss whether to include
under medicinal or moral phenomena, recalls a
remarkable anticipation of Goethe. "Without a
lively pathological interest," he says, " I too have
never yet succeeded in elaborating a tragic situation
of any kind, and hence I have rather avoided than
sought it. Can it perhaps have been still another
of the merits of the ancients that the deepest
pathos was with them merely aesthetic play,
whereas with us the truth of nature must co-
## p. 171 (#215) ############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 171
operate in order to produce such a work? " We
can now answer in the affirmative this latter pro-
found question after our glorious experiences, in
which we have found to our astonishment in the
case of musical tragedy itself, that the deepest
pathos can in reality be merely aesthetic play: and
therefore we are justified in believing that now for
the first time the proto-phenomenon of the tragic
can be portrayed with some degree of success. He
who now will still persist in talking only of those
vicarious effects proceeding from ultra-aesthetic
spheres, and does not feel himself raised above
the pathologically-moral process, may be left to
despair of his aesthetic nature: for which we re-
commend to him, by way of innocent equivalent,
the interpretation of Shakespeare after the fashion
of Gervinus, and the diligent search for poetic
justice.
Thus with the re-birth of tragedy the cesthetic
hearer is also born anew, in whose place in the
theatre a curious quid pro quo was wont to sit |
with half-moral and half-learned pretensions,—the
"critic. " In his sphere hitherto everything has
been artificial and merely glossed over with a
semblance of life. The performing artist was in
fact at a loss what to do with such a critically
comporting hearer, and hence he, as well as the
dramatist or operatic composer who inspired him,
searched anxiously for the last remains of life in
a being so pretentiously barren and incapable of
enjoyment. Such " critics," however, have hitherto
constituted the public; the student, the school-
boy, yea, even the most harmless womanly creature,
## p. 172 (#216) ############################################
172 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
were already unwittingly prepared by education
and by journals for a similar perception of works
of art. The nobler natures among the artists
counted upon exciting the moral-religious forces
in such a public, and the appeal to a moral order
of the world operated vicariously, when in reality
some powerful artistic spell should have enraptured
the true hearer. Or again, some imposing or at
all events exciting tendency of the contemporary
political and social world was presented by the
dramatist with such vividness that the hearer could
forget his critical exhaustion and abandon himself
to similar emotions, as, in patriotic or warlike
moments, before the tribune of parliament, or at
the condemnation of crime and vice:—an estrange-
ment of the true aims of art which could not but
lead directly now and then to a cult of tendency.
But here there took place what has always taken
place in the case of factitious arts, an extraordinary
rapid depravation of these tendencies, so that for
instance the tendency to employ the theatre as a
means for the moral education of the people,
which in Schiller's time was taken seriously, is
already reckoned among the incredible antiquities
of a surmounted culture. While the critic got
the upper hand in the theatre and concert-hall,
the journalist in the school, and the press in society,
art degenerated into a topic of conversation of the
most trivial kind, and aesthetic criticism was used
as the cement of a vain, distracted, selfish and
moreover piteously unoriginal sociality, the sig-
nificance of which is suggested by the Schopen-
hauerian parable of the porcupines, so that there
## p. 173 (#217) ############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 173
has never been so much gossip about art and so
little esteem for it. But is it still possible to
have intercourse with a man capable of conversing
on Beethoven or Shakespeare? Let each answer
this question according to his sentiments: he will \
at any rate show by his answer his conception of
"culture," provided he tries at least to answer the
question, and has not already grown mute with
astonishment.
On the other hand, many a one more nobly
and delicately endowed by nature, though he may
have gradually become a critical barbarian in the
manner described, could tell of the unexpected as
well as totally unintelligible effect which a success-
ful performance of Lohengrin, for example, exerted
on him: except that perhaps every warning and
interpreting hand was lacking to guide him; so
that the incomprehensibly heterogeneous and alto-
gether incomparable sensation which then affected
him also remained isolated and became extinct,
like a mysterious star after a brief brilliancy. He
then divined what the aesthetic hearer is.
23.
He who wishes to test himself rigorously as to
how he is related to the true aesthetic hearer, or
whether he belongs rather to the community of
the Socrato-critical man, has only to enquire
sincerely concerning the sentiment with which he
accepts the wonder represented on the stage:
whether he feels his historical sense, which insists
on strict psychological causality, insulted by it,
## p. 174 (#218) ############################################
174 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
whether with benevolent concession he as it were
admits the wonder as a phenomenon intelligible
to childhood, but relinquished by him, or whether
he experiences anything else thereby. For he
will thus be enabled to determine how far he is
on the whole capable of understanding myth, that
is to say, the concentrated picture of the world,
which, as abbreviature of phenomena, cannot
dispense with wonder. It is probable, however,
that nearly every one, upon close examination,
feels so disintegrated by the critico-historical spirit
of our culture, that he can only perhaps make the
former existence of myth credible to himself by
learned means through intermediary abstractions.
Without myth, however, every culture loses its
healthy creative natural power: it is only a horizon
encompassed with myths which rounds off to
unity a social movement. It is only by myth
that all the powers of the imagination and of the
Apollonian dream are freed from their random
rovings. The mythical figures have to be the
invisibly omnipresent genii, under the care of
which the young soul grows to maturity, by the
signs of which the man gives a meaning to his life
and struggles: and the state itself knows no
more powerful unwritten law than the mythical
foundation which vouches for its connection with
religion and its growth from mythical ideas.
Let us now place alongside thereof the abstract
man proceeding independently of myth, the
abstract education, the abstract usage, the abstract
right, the abstract state: let us picture to our-
selves the lawless roving of the artistic imagination,
## p. 175 (#219) ############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
175
not bridled by any native myth: let us imagine
a culture which has no fixed and sacred primitive
seat, but is doomed to exhaust all its possibilities,
and has to nourish itself wretchedly from the other'
cultures—such is the Present, as the result of;
Socratism, which is bent on the destruction of;
myth. And now the myth-less man remains'
eternally hungering among all the bygones, and
digs and grubs for roots, though he have to dig
for them even among the remotest antiquities.
The stupendous historical exigency of the un-
satisfied modern culture, the gathering around one
of countless other cultures, the consuming desire j
for knowledge—what does all this point to, if'
not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical
home, the mythical source? Let us ask ourselves
whether the feverish and so uncanny stirring of
this culture is aught but the eager seizing and
snatching at food of the hungerer—and who would
care to contribute anything more to a culture
which cannot be appeased by all it devours, and
in contact with which the most vigorous and
wholesome nourishment is wont to change into
"history and criticism "?
We should also have to regard our German
character with despair and sorrow, if it had already
become inextricably entangled in, or even identical
with this culture, in a similar manner as we can
observe it to our horror to be the case in civilised
France; and that which for a long time was the
great advantage of France and the cause of her vast
preponderance, to wit, this very identity of people
and culture, might compel us at the sight thereof
.
. i. C . r.
## p. 176 (#220) ############################################
176 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
to congratulate ourselves that this culture of ours,
which is so questionable, has hitherto had nothing
in common with the noble kernel of the character
of our people All our hopes, on the contrary,
stretch out longingly towards the perception that
beneath this restlessly palpitating civilised life
and educational convulsion there is concealed a
glorious, intrinsically healthy, primeval power,
which, to be sure, stirs vigorously only at intervals
in stupendous moments, and then dreams on again
in view of a future awakening. It is from this
abyss that the German Reformation came forth:
in the choral-hymn of which the future melody of
German music first resounded. So deep, courage-
ous, and soul-breathing, so exuberantly good and
tender did this chorale of Luther sound,—as the
first Dionysian-luring call which breaks forth from
dense thickets at the approach of spring. To it
responded with emulative echo the solemnly
wanton procession of Dionysian revellers, to whom
we are indebeted for German music—and to whom
we shall be indebted for tJie re-birth of German
myth.
I know that I must now lead the sympathising
and attentive friend to an elevated position of
lonesome contemplation, where he will have but
few companions, and I call out encouragingly
to him that we must hold fast to our shining
guides, the Greeks. For the rectification of our
aesthetic knowledge we previously borrowed from
them the two divine figures, each of which sways
a separate realm of art, and concerning whose
mutual contact and exaltation we have acquired
. ^S=-i•.
## p. 177 (#221) ############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 177
a notion through Greek tragedy. Through a
remarkable disruption of both these primitive
artistic impulses, the ruin of Greek tragedy seemed
to be necessarily brought about: with which
process a degeneration and a transmutation of the
Greek national character was strictly in keeping,
summoning us to earnest reflection as to how
closely and necessarily art and the people, myth
and custom, tragedy and the state, have coalesced
in their bases. The ruin of tragedy was at the
same time the ruin of myth. Until then the
Greeks had been involuntarily compelled immedi-
ately to associate all experiences with their myths,
indeed they had to comprehend them only through
this association: whereby even the most immedi-
ate present necessarily appeared to them sub specie
CBterni and in a certain sense as timeless. Into
this current of the timeless, however, the state
as well as art plunged in order to find repose
from the burden and eagerness of the moment.
And a people—for the rest, also a man—is worth
just as much only as its ability to impress on its
experiences the seal of eternity: for it is thus, as
it were, desecularised, and reveals its unconscious
inner conviction of the relativity of time and of
the true, that is, the metaphysical significance of
life. The contrary happens when a people begins
to comprehend itself historically and to demolish
the mythical bulwarks around it: with which there
is usually connected a marked secularisation, a
breach with the unconscious metaphysics of its
earlier existence, in all ethical consequences.
Greek art and especially Greek tragedy delayed
M
## p. 178 (#222) ############################################
I78 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
above all the annihilation of myth: it was
necessary to annihilate these also to be able to
live detached from the native soil, unbridled in
the wilderness of thought, custom, and action.
Even in such circumstances this metaphysical
impulse still endeavours to create for itself a form
of apotheosis (weakened, no doubt) in the Socratism
of science urging to life: but on its lower stage
this same impulse led only to a feverish search,
which gradually merged into a pandemonium of
myths and superstitions accumulated from all
quarters: in the midst of which, nevertheless, the
Hellene sat with a yearning heart till he contrived,
as Graeculus, to mask his fever with Greek cheer-
fulness and Greek levity, or to narcotise himself
completely with some gloomy Oriental superstition.
We have approached this condition in the most
striking manner since the reawakening of the
Alexandro - Roman antiquity in the fifteenth
century, after a long, not easily describable, inter-
lude. On the heights there is the same ex-
uberant love of knowledge, the same insatiate
happiness of the discoverer, the same stupendous
secularisation, and, together with these, a homeless
roving about, an eager intrusion at foreign tables,
a frivolous deification of the present or a dull
senseless estrangement, all sub sped sceculi, of the
present time: which same symptoms lead one to
infer the same defect at the heart of this culture,
the annihilation of myth. It seems hardly
possible to transplant a foreign myth with perman-
ent success, without dreadfully injuring the tree
through this transplantation: which is perhaps
## p. 179 (#223) ############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDV. 179
occasionally strong enough and sound enough to
eliminate the foreign element after a terrible
struggle; but must ordinarily consume itself in
a languishing and stunted condition or in sickly
luxuriance. Our opinion of the pure and vigorous
kernel of the German being is such that we
venture to expect of it, and only of it, this elimina-
tion of forcibly ingrafted foreign elements, and we
deem it possible that the German spirit will reflect
anew on itself. Perhaps many a one will be of
opinion that this spirit must begin its struggle
with the elimination of the Romanic element: for
which it might recognise an external preparation
and encouragement in the victorious bravery and
bloody glory of the late war, but must seek the
inner constraint in the emulative zeal to be for
ever worthy of the sublime protagonists on this
path, of Luther as well as our great artists and
poets. But let him never think he can fight such
battles without his household gods, without his
mythical home, without a "restoration" of all
German things! And if the German should look
timidly around for a guide to lead him back to
his long-lost home, the ways and paths of which
he knows no longer—let him but listen to the
delightfully luring call of the Dionysian bird,
which hovers above him, and would fain point
out to him the way thither.
24.
Among the peculiar artistic effects of musical \
tragedy we had to emphasise an Apollonian
illusion, through which we are to be saved from
## p. 180 (#224) ############################################
l8o THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
immediate oneness with the Dionysian music,
while our musical excitement is able to discharge
itself on an Apollonian domain and in an inter-
posed visible middle world. It thereby seemed to
us that precisely through this discharge the middle
world of theatrical procedure, the drama generally,
became visible and intelligible from within in a
degree unattainable in the other forms of Apol-
lonian art: so that here, where this art was as it
were winged and borne aloft by the spirit of
music, we had to recognise the highest exaltation
of its powers, and consequently in the fraternal
union of Apollo and Dionysus the climax of the
Apollonian as well as of the Dionysian artistic
aims.
Of course, the Apollonian light-picture did not,
precisely with this inner illumination through
music, attain the peculiar effect of the weaker
grades of Apollonian art. What the epos and
the animated stone can do—constrain the con-
templating eye to calm delight in the world of
the individuatio—could not be realised here, not-
withstanding the greater animation and distinct-
ness. We contemplated the drama and penetrated
with piercing glance into its inner agitated world
of motives—and yet it seemed as if only a sym-
bolic picture passed before us, the profoundest
significance of which we almost believed we had
divined, and which we desired to put aside like a
curtain in order to behold the original behind it.
The greatest distinctness of the picture did not
suffice us: for it seemed to reveal as well as veil
something; and while it seemed, with its symbolic
## p. 181 (#225) ############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. l8l
revelation, to invite the rending of the veil for
„the disclosure of the mysterious background, this
illumined all-conspicuousness itself enthralled the
eye and prevented it from penetrating more deeply.
He who has not experienced this,—to have to
view, and at the same time to have a longing
beyond the viewing,—will hardly be able to con-
ceive how clearly and definitely these two processes
coexist in the contemplation of tragic myth and
are felt to be conjoined; while the truly aesthetic
spectators will confirm my assertion that among
the peculiar effects of tragedy this conjunction is
the most noteworthy. Now let this phenomenon
of the aesthetic spectator be transferred to an
analogous process in the tragic artist, and the
genesis of tragic myth will have been understood.
It shares with the Apollonian sphere of art the
full delight in appearance and contemplation, and
at the same time it denies this delight and finds
a still higher satisfaction in the annihilation of the |
visible world of appearance. The substance of
tragic myth is first of all an epic event involving ^
the glorification of the fighting hero: but whence
originates the essentially enigmatical trait, that
the suffering in the fate of the hero, the most
painful victories, the most agonising contrasts of
motives, in short, the exemplification of the wisdom
of Silenus, or, aesthetically expressed, the Ugly
and Discordant, is always represented anew in such
countless forms with such predilection, and pre-
cisely in the most youthful and exuberant age of
a people, unless there is really a higher delight
experienced in all this?
## p. 182 (#226) ############################################
182 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
For the fact that things actually take such a
tragic course would least of all explain the origin
of a form of art; provided that art is not merely
an imitation of the reality of nature, but Hi truth
. a metaphysical supplement, ro tne reality of nature,
placed alongside thereof lor its conquest. Iragic
myth, in so far as it really belongs to art, also
fully participates in this transfiguring metaphysical
purpose of art in general: wtiat does it trans-
figure, however, when it presents the phenomenal
world in the guise of the suffering hero? Least
of all the "reality" of this phenomenal world, for
it says to us: "Look at this! Look carefully!
It is your life! It is the hour-hand of your clock
of existence! "
l And myth has displayed this life, in order
ithereby to transfigure it to us? If not, how shall
we account for the aesthetic pleasure with which
we make even these representations pass before us?
I am inquiring concerning the aesthetic pleasure,
and am well aware that many of these representa-
tions may moreover occasionally create even a
moral delectation, say under the form of pity or
of a moral triumph. But he who would derive
the effect of the tragic exclusively from these
moral sources, as was usually the case far too long
in aesthetics, let him not think that he has done
anything for Art thereby; for Art must above all
insist on purity in her domain. For the explanation
of tragic myth the very first requirement is that
the pleasure which characterises it must be sought
in the purely aesthetic sphere, without encroaching
on the domain of pity, fear, or the morally-subjime.
## p. 183 (#227) ############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 183
How can the ugly and the discordant, the sub-
stance of tragic myth, excite an aesthetic pleasure?
Here it is necessary to raise ourselves with a
daring bound into a metaphysics of Art. I repeat,
therefore, my former proposition, that it is only
as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and
the world appear justified: and in this sense if is
precisely the function oftragic myth to convince
^us that even the Ugly and Discordant is an
artistic game which the will, in the eternal fulness
of its joy, plays with itself. But this not easily
comprehensible proto-phenomenon of Dionysian
Art becomes, in a direct way, singularly intelligible,
and is immediately apprehended in the wonder-
ful significance of musical dissonance: just as in
general it is music alone, placed in contrast to
the world, which can give us an idea as to what
is meant by the justification of the world as an
aesthetic phenomenon. The joy that the tragic
myth excites has the same origin as the joyful
sensation of dissonance in music. The Dionysian,
with its primitive joy experienced in pain itself, is
the common source of music and tragic myth.
Is it not possible that by calling to our aid the
musical relation of dissonance, the difficult problem
of tragic effect may have meanwhile been materi-
ally facilitated? For we now understand what it
means to wish to view tragedy and at the same
time to have a longing beyond the viewing: a frame
of mind, which, as regards the artistically employed
dissonance, we should simply have to characterise by
saying that we desire to hear and at the same time
have a longing beyond the hearing. That striving
## p. 184 (#228) ############################################
184 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
for the infinite, the pinion-flapping of longing, ac-
companying the highest delight in the clearly-
perceived reality, remind one that in both states we
have to recognise a Dionysian phenomenon, which
again and again reveals to us anew the playful up-
building and demolishing of the world of individuals
as the efflux of a primitive delight, in like manner
as when Heraclitus the Obscure compares the
world-building power to a playing child which
places stones here and there and builds sandhills
only to overthrow them again.
Hence, in order to form a true estimate of the
Dionysian capacity of a people, it would seem that
we must think not only of their music, but just as
much of their tragic myth, the second witness of
this capacity. Considering this most intimate
relationship between music and myth, we may now
in like manner suppose that a degeneration and
depravation of the one involves a deterioration of
the other: if it be true at all that the weakening
of the myth is generally expressive of a debilitation
of the Dionysian capacity. Concerning both, how-
ever, a glance at the development of the German
genius should not leave us in any doubt; in the
opera just as in the abstract character of our myth-
less existence, in an art sunk to pastime just as in
a life guided by concepts, the inartistic as well as
life-consuming nature of Socratic optimism had
revealed itself to us. Yet there have been indica-
tions to console us that nevertheless in some inac-
cessible abyss the German spirit still rests and
dreams, undestroyed, in glorious health, profundity,
and Dionysian strength, like a knight sunk in
## p. 185 (#229) ############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
185
slumber: from which abyss the Dionysian song
rises to us to let us know that this German knight
even still dreams his primitive Dionysian myth in
blissfully earnest visions. Let no one believe that
the German spirit has for ever lost its mythical home
when it still understands so obviously the voices of
the birds which tell of that home. Some day it
will find itself awake in all the morning freshness
of a deep sleep: then it will slay the dragons,
destroy the malignant dwarfs, and waken Brünn-
hilde—and Wotan's spear itself will be unable to
obstruct its course!
My friends, ye who believe in Dionysian music,
ye know also what tragedy means to us. There
we have tragic myth, born anew from music,—and
in this latest birth ye can hope for everything and
forget what is most afflicting. What is most afflict-
ing to all of us, however, is—the prolonged degrada-
tion in which the German genius has lived estranged
from house and home in the service of malignant
dwarfs. Ye understand my allusion—as ye will
also, in conclusion, understand my hopes.
25.
Music and tragic myth are equally the expression
of the Dionysian capacity of a people, and are
inseparable from each other. Both originate in
an ultra-Apollonian sphere of art;-both transfigure
a region in the delightful accords of which all dis-
sonance, just like the terrible picture of the world,
dies charmingly away ; both play with the sting of
displeasure, trusting to their most potent magic; 1
## p. 186 (#230) ############################################
186 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
both justify thereby the existence even of the
"worst world. "~ Here ffle" Uionysian, as compared
with the Apollonian, exhibits itself as the eternal
and original artistic force, which in general calls
into existence the entire world of phenomena: in
the midst of which a new transfiguring appearance
becomes necessary, in order to keep alive the ani-
mated world of individuation. If we could conceive
an incarnation of dissonance—and what is man but
that? —then, to be able to live this dissonance would
require a glorious illusion which would spread a
veil of beauty over its peculiar nature. This is the
true function of Apollo as deity of art: in whose
name we comprise all the countless manifestations
of the fair realm of illusion, which each moment
render life in general worth living and make one
impatient for the experience of the next moment.
At the same time, just as much of this basis of
all existence—the Dionysian substratum of the
world—is allowed to enter into the consciousness
of human beings, as can be surmounted again by
the Apollonian transfiguring power, so that these
two art-impulses are constrained to develop their
powers in strictly mutual proportion, according to
the law of eternal justice. When the Dionysian
powers rise with such vehemence as we experience
at present, there can be no doubt that, veiled in a
cloud, Apollo has already descended to us; whose
grandest beautifying influences a coming genera-
tion will perhaps behold.
That this effect is necessary, however, each one
would most surely perceive by intuition, if once he
found himself carried back—even in a dream—into
## p. 187 (#231) ############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 187
an Old-Hellenic existence. In walking under high
Ionic colonnades, looking upwards to a horizon
defined by clear and noble lines, with reflections of
his transfigured form by his side in shining marble,
and around him solemnly marching or quietly
moving men, with harmoniously sounding voices
and rhythmical pantomime, would he not in the
presence of this perpetual influx of beauty have to
raise his hand to Apollo and exclaim: "Blessed
race of Hellenes! How great Dionysus must be
among you,when the Delian god deems such charms
necessary to cure you of your dithyrambic mad-
ness ! "—To one in this frame of mind, however, an
aged Athenian, looking up to him with the sublime
eye of ^Eschylus, might answer: "Say also this,
thou curious stranger: what sufferings this people
must have undergone, in order to be able to become
thus beautiful! But now follow me to a tragic
play, and sacrifice with me in the temple of both
the deities 1"
## p. 188 (#232) ############################################
## p. 189 (#233) ############################################
APPENDIX.
[Late in the year 1888, not long before he was overcome by
his sudden attack of insanity, Nietzsche wrote down a
few notes concerning his early work, the Birth of
Tragedy, These were printed in his sister's biography
{Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches, vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 102 ff. ),
and are here translated as likely to be of interest to
readers of this remarkable work. They also appear in
the Ecce Homo. —Translator's Note. ]
"To be just to the Birth of Tragedy (1872), one
will have to forget some few things. It has
wrought effects, it even fascinated through that
wherein it was amiss—through its application to
Wagnerism, just as if this Wagnerism were symp-
tomatic of a rise and going up. And just on that
account was the book an event in Wagner's life:
from thence and only from thence were great
hopes linked to the name of Wagner. Even to-
day people remind me, sometimes right in the
midst of a talk on Parsifal, that / and none other
have it on my conscience that such a high opinion of
the cultural value of this movement came to the top.
More than once have I found the book referred
to as 'the Re-h\rth of Tragedy out of the Spirit
of Music': one only had an ear for a new formula
of Wagner's art, aim, task,—and failed to hear
## p. 190 (#234) ############################################
igO THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
withal what was at bottom valuable therein.
'Hellenism and Pessimism' had been a more
unequivocal title: namely, as a first lesson on the
way in which the Greeks got the better of pessi-
mism,—on the means whereby they overcame it
Tragedy simply proves that the Greeks were no
pessimists: Schopenhauer was mistaken here as
he was mistaken in all other things. Considered
with some neutrality, the Birth of Tragedy appears
very unseasonable: one would not even dream
that it was begun amid the thunders of the battle
of Worth. I thought these problems through and
through before the walls of Metz in cold September
nights, in the midst of the work of nursing the
sick; one might even believe the book to be fifty
years older. It is politically indifferent—un-
German one will say to-day,—it smells shockingly
Hegelian, in but a few formulae does it scent of
Schopenhauer's funereal perfume. An 'idea'—
the antithesis of' Dionysian versus Apollonian'—
translated into metaphysics; history itself as the
evolution of this 'idea'; the antithesis dissolved
into oneness in Tragedy; through this optics
things that had never yet looked into one another's
face, confronted of a sudden, and illumined and
comprehended through one another: for instance,
Opera and Revolution. The two decisive innova-
tions of the book are, on the one hand, the com-
prehension of the Dionysian phenomenon among
the Greeks (it gives the first psychology thereof,
it sees therein the One root of all Grecian art);
on the other, the comprehension of Socratism:
Socrates diagnosed for the first time as the tool
## p. 191 (#235) ############################################
APPENDIX. 191
of Grecian dissolution, as a typical decadent.
'Rationality' against instinct! ' Rationality' at
any price as a dangerous, as a life-undermining
force! Throughout the whole book a deep hostile
silence on Christianity: it is neither Apollonian
nor Dionysian; it negatives all aesthetic values
(the only values recognised by the Birth of
Tragedy), it is in the widest sense nihilistic,
whereas in the Dionysian symbol the utmost limit
of affirmation is reached. Once or twice the
Christian priests are alluded to as a 'malignant
kind of dwarfs,' as 'subterraneans. '"
"This beginning is singular beyond measure.
I had for my own inmost experience discovered
the only symbol and counterpart of history,—I had
just thereby been the first to grasp the wonderful
phenomenon of the Dionysian. And again, through
my diagnosing Socrates as a decadent, I had given
a wholly unequivocal proof of how little risk the
trustworthiness of my psychological grasp would
run of being weakened by some moralistic idiosyn-
crasy :—to view morality itself as a symptom of
decadence is an innovation, a novelty of the first
rank in the history of knowledge. How far I had
leaped in either case beyond the smug shallow-
pate-gossip of optimism contra pessimism! I
was the first to see the intrinsic antithesis: here,
the degenerating instinct which, with subterranean
vindictiveness, turns against life (Christianity, the
philosophy of Schopenhauer, in a certain sense
already the philosophy of Plato, all idealistic
## p. 192 (#236) ############################################
192 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
systems as typical forms), and there, a formula of
highest affirmation, born of fullness and overfull-
ness, a yea-saying without reserve to suffering's
self, to guilt's self, to all that is questionable and
strange in existence itself. This final, cheerfullest,
exuberantly mad-and-merriest Yea to life is not
only the highest insight, it is also the deepest, it
is that which is most rigorously confirmed and
upheld by truth and science. Naught that is, is
to be deducted, naught is dispensable; the phases
of existence rejected by the Christians and other
nihilists are even of an infinitely higher order
in the hierarchy of values than that which the
instinct of decadence sanctions, yea durst sanction.
To comprehend this courage is needed, and, as a
condition thereof, a surplus of strength: for pre-
cisely in degree as courage dares to thrust forward,
precisely according to the measure of strength,
does one approach truth. Perception, the yea-
saying to reality, is as much a necessity to the
strong as to the weak, under the inspiration of
weakness, cowardly shrinking, and flight from
reality—the 'ideal. ' . . . They are not free to
perceive: the decadents have need of the lie,—it is
one of their conditions of self-preservation. Whoso
not only comprehends the word Dionysian, but
also grasps his self in this word, requires no refu-
tation of Plato or of Christianity or of Schopen-
hauer—he smells the putrefaction''
3.
"To what extent I had just thereby found the
concept 'tragic,' the definitive perception of the
m
vitfk
## p. 193 (#237) ############################################
APPENDIX. 193
psychology of tragedy, I have but lately stated
in the Twilight of the Idols, page 139 (1st edit. ):
'The affirmation of life, even in its most unfamiliar j
and severe problems, the will to life, enjoying its
own inexhaustibility in the sacrifice of its highest
types,—that is what I called Dionysian, that is
what I divined as the bridge to a psychology of
the tragic poet.
Not in order to get rid of terror
and pity, not to purify from a dangerous passion
by its vehement discharge (it was thus that
Aristotle misunderstood it); but, beyond terror
and pity, to realise in fact the eternal delight of
becoming, that delight which even involves in itself
the joy of annihilating. ' * In this sense I have the
right to understand myself to be the first tragic
philosopher—that is, the utmost antithesis and
antipode to a pessimistic philosopher. Prior to
myself there is no such translation of the Dionysian
into the philosophic pathos: there lacks the tragic
wisdom,—I have sought in vain for an indication
thereof even among the great Greeks of philosophy,
the thinkers of the two centuries before Socrates.
A doubt still possessed me as touching Heraclitus,
in whose proximity I in general begin to feel
warmer and better than anywhere else. The
affirmation of transiency and annihilation, to wit
the decisive factor in a Dionysian philosophy, the
yea-saying to antithesis and war, to becoming, with
radical rejection even of the concept ' being',—that
I must directly acknowledge as, of all thinking
hitherto, the nearest to my own. The doctrine of
* Mr. Common's translation, pp. 227-28.
N
## p. 194 (#238) ############################################
194 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
'eternal recurrence,' that is, of the unconditioned
and infinitely repeated cycle of all things—this
doctrine of Zarathustra's might after all have been
already taught by Heraclitus. At any rate the
portico* which inherited well-nigh all its fundamental
conceptions from Heraclitus, shows traces thereof. "
A-
"In this book speaks a prodigious hope. In
fine, I see no reason whatever for taking back my
hope of a Dionysian future for music. Let us
cast a glance a century ahead, let us suppose my
assault upon two millenniums of anti-nature and
man-vilification succeeds! That new party of
life which will take in hand the greatest of all
tasks, the upbreeding of mankind to something
higher,—add thereto the relentless annihilation of
all things degenerating and parasitic, will again
make possible on earth that too-much of life, from
which there also must needs grow again the
Dionysian state. I promise a tragic age: the
highest art in the yea-saying to life, tragedy, will
be born anew, when mankind have behind them the
consciousness of the hardest but most necessary
wars, without suffering therefrom. A psychologist
might still add that what I heard in my younger
years in Wagnerian music had in general naught to
do with Wagner ; that when I described Wagnerian
music I described what / had heard, that I had
instinctively to translate and transfigure all into the
new spirit which I bore within myself. . . . "
## p. (#239) ################################################
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
: "3 9015 00588 7552
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
DATE DUE
APR 15 1990
DEL TEEM?
OCT
1990
SEP 27 1990
DEC-27: 1990. com
. - APR 18-1991
AUG LA
## p. (#244) ################################################
## p. (#245) ################################################
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
3 9015 00588 7552
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
DATE DUE
APR 85 1990
S 31 1350
COCA
1990
SEP 27 1990
DEC 27: 1990
APR 18-1991
POGLE
MAR 2 A 1996
## p. (#246) ################################################
I ,ji. i. . ;y. i,>. V*i'f;-,•li«. ,i*li fJUv. . t
.
\JO THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
while they are indefatigable in characterising the
struggle of the hero with fate, the triumph of the
moral order of the world, or the disburdenment of
the emotions through tragedy, as the properly
Tragic: an indefatigableness which makes me think
that they are perhaps not aesthetically excitable
men at all, but only to be regarded as moral
beings when hearing tragedy. Never since Aris-
totle has an explanation of the tragic effect been
proposed, by which an aesthetic activity of the
hearer could be inferred from artistic circumstances.
At one time fear and pity are supposed to be forced
to an alleviating discharge through the serious pro-
cedure, at another time we are expected to feel
elevated and inspired at the triumph of good and
noble principles, at the sacrifice of the hero in the
interest of a moral conception of things; and how-
ever certainly I believe that for countless men
precisely this, and only this, is the effect of tragedy,
it as obviously follows therefrom that all these,
together with their interpreting aesthetes, have had
no experience of tragedy as the highest art. The
pathological discharge, the catharsis of Aristotle,
which philologists are at a loss whether to include
under medicinal or moral phenomena, recalls a
remarkable anticipation of Goethe. "Without a
lively pathological interest," he says, " I too have
never yet succeeded in elaborating a tragic situation
of any kind, and hence I have rather avoided than
sought it. Can it perhaps have been still another
of the merits of the ancients that the deepest
pathos was with them merely aesthetic play,
whereas with us the truth of nature must co-
## p. 171 (#215) ############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 171
operate in order to produce such a work? " We
can now answer in the affirmative this latter pro-
found question after our glorious experiences, in
which we have found to our astonishment in the
case of musical tragedy itself, that the deepest
pathos can in reality be merely aesthetic play: and
therefore we are justified in believing that now for
the first time the proto-phenomenon of the tragic
can be portrayed with some degree of success. He
who now will still persist in talking only of those
vicarious effects proceeding from ultra-aesthetic
spheres, and does not feel himself raised above
the pathologically-moral process, may be left to
despair of his aesthetic nature: for which we re-
commend to him, by way of innocent equivalent,
the interpretation of Shakespeare after the fashion
of Gervinus, and the diligent search for poetic
justice.
Thus with the re-birth of tragedy the cesthetic
hearer is also born anew, in whose place in the
theatre a curious quid pro quo was wont to sit |
with half-moral and half-learned pretensions,—the
"critic. " In his sphere hitherto everything has
been artificial and merely glossed over with a
semblance of life. The performing artist was in
fact at a loss what to do with such a critically
comporting hearer, and hence he, as well as the
dramatist or operatic composer who inspired him,
searched anxiously for the last remains of life in
a being so pretentiously barren and incapable of
enjoyment. Such " critics," however, have hitherto
constituted the public; the student, the school-
boy, yea, even the most harmless womanly creature,
## p. 172 (#216) ############################################
172 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
were already unwittingly prepared by education
and by journals for a similar perception of works
of art. The nobler natures among the artists
counted upon exciting the moral-religious forces
in such a public, and the appeal to a moral order
of the world operated vicariously, when in reality
some powerful artistic spell should have enraptured
the true hearer. Or again, some imposing or at
all events exciting tendency of the contemporary
political and social world was presented by the
dramatist with such vividness that the hearer could
forget his critical exhaustion and abandon himself
to similar emotions, as, in patriotic or warlike
moments, before the tribune of parliament, or at
the condemnation of crime and vice:—an estrange-
ment of the true aims of art which could not but
lead directly now and then to a cult of tendency.
But here there took place what has always taken
place in the case of factitious arts, an extraordinary
rapid depravation of these tendencies, so that for
instance the tendency to employ the theatre as a
means for the moral education of the people,
which in Schiller's time was taken seriously, is
already reckoned among the incredible antiquities
of a surmounted culture. While the critic got
the upper hand in the theatre and concert-hall,
the journalist in the school, and the press in society,
art degenerated into a topic of conversation of the
most trivial kind, and aesthetic criticism was used
as the cement of a vain, distracted, selfish and
moreover piteously unoriginal sociality, the sig-
nificance of which is suggested by the Schopen-
hauerian parable of the porcupines, so that there
## p. 173 (#217) ############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 173
has never been so much gossip about art and so
little esteem for it. But is it still possible to
have intercourse with a man capable of conversing
on Beethoven or Shakespeare? Let each answer
this question according to his sentiments: he will \
at any rate show by his answer his conception of
"culture," provided he tries at least to answer the
question, and has not already grown mute with
astonishment.
On the other hand, many a one more nobly
and delicately endowed by nature, though he may
have gradually become a critical barbarian in the
manner described, could tell of the unexpected as
well as totally unintelligible effect which a success-
ful performance of Lohengrin, for example, exerted
on him: except that perhaps every warning and
interpreting hand was lacking to guide him; so
that the incomprehensibly heterogeneous and alto-
gether incomparable sensation which then affected
him also remained isolated and became extinct,
like a mysterious star after a brief brilliancy. He
then divined what the aesthetic hearer is.
23.
He who wishes to test himself rigorously as to
how he is related to the true aesthetic hearer, or
whether he belongs rather to the community of
the Socrato-critical man, has only to enquire
sincerely concerning the sentiment with which he
accepts the wonder represented on the stage:
whether he feels his historical sense, which insists
on strict psychological causality, insulted by it,
## p. 174 (#218) ############################################
174 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
whether with benevolent concession he as it were
admits the wonder as a phenomenon intelligible
to childhood, but relinquished by him, or whether
he experiences anything else thereby. For he
will thus be enabled to determine how far he is
on the whole capable of understanding myth, that
is to say, the concentrated picture of the world,
which, as abbreviature of phenomena, cannot
dispense with wonder. It is probable, however,
that nearly every one, upon close examination,
feels so disintegrated by the critico-historical spirit
of our culture, that he can only perhaps make the
former existence of myth credible to himself by
learned means through intermediary abstractions.
Without myth, however, every culture loses its
healthy creative natural power: it is only a horizon
encompassed with myths which rounds off to
unity a social movement. It is only by myth
that all the powers of the imagination and of the
Apollonian dream are freed from their random
rovings. The mythical figures have to be the
invisibly omnipresent genii, under the care of
which the young soul grows to maturity, by the
signs of which the man gives a meaning to his life
and struggles: and the state itself knows no
more powerful unwritten law than the mythical
foundation which vouches for its connection with
religion and its growth from mythical ideas.
Let us now place alongside thereof the abstract
man proceeding independently of myth, the
abstract education, the abstract usage, the abstract
right, the abstract state: let us picture to our-
selves the lawless roving of the artistic imagination,
## p. 175 (#219) ############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
175
not bridled by any native myth: let us imagine
a culture which has no fixed and sacred primitive
seat, but is doomed to exhaust all its possibilities,
and has to nourish itself wretchedly from the other'
cultures—such is the Present, as the result of;
Socratism, which is bent on the destruction of;
myth. And now the myth-less man remains'
eternally hungering among all the bygones, and
digs and grubs for roots, though he have to dig
for them even among the remotest antiquities.
The stupendous historical exigency of the un-
satisfied modern culture, the gathering around one
of countless other cultures, the consuming desire j
for knowledge—what does all this point to, if'
not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical
home, the mythical source? Let us ask ourselves
whether the feverish and so uncanny stirring of
this culture is aught but the eager seizing and
snatching at food of the hungerer—and who would
care to contribute anything more to a culture
which cannot be appeased by all it devours, and
in contact with which the most vigorous and
wholesome nourishment is wont to change into
"history and criticism "?
We should also have to regard our German
character with despair and sorrow, if it had already
become inextricably entangled in, or even identical
with this culture, in a similar manner as we can
observe it to our horror to be the case in civilised
France; and that which for a long time was the
great advantage of France and the cause of her vast
preponderance, to wit, this very identity of people
and culture, might compel us at the sight thereof
.
. i. C . r.
## p. 176 (#220) ############################################
176 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
to congratulate ourselves that this culture of ours,
which is so questionable, has hitherto had nothing
in common with the noble kernel of the character
of our people All our hopes, on the contrary,
stretch out longingly towards the perception that
beneath this restlessly palpitating civilised life
and educational convulsion there is concealed a
glorious, intrinsically healthy, primeval power,
which, to be sure, stirs vigorously only at intervals
in stupendous moments, and then dreams on again
in view of a future awakening. It is from this
abyss that the German Reformation came forth:
in the choral-hymn of which the future melody of
German music first resounded. So deep, courage-
ous, and soul-breathing, so exuberantly good and
tender did this chorale of Luther sound,—as the
first Dionysian-luring call which breaks forth from
dense thickets at the approach of spring. To it
responded with emulative echo the solemnly
wanton procession of Dionysian revellers, to whom
we are indebeted for German music—and to whom
we shall be indebted for tJie re-birth of German
myth.
I know that I must now lead the sympathising
and attentive friend to an elevated position of
lonesome contemplation, where he will have but
few companions, and I call out encouragingly
to him that we must hold fast to our shining
guides, the Greeks. For the rectification of our
aesthetic knowledge we previously borrowed from
them the two divine figures, each of which sways
a separate realm of art, and concerning whose
mutual contact and exaltation we have acquired
. ^S=-i•.
## p. 177 (#221) ############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 177
a notion through Greek tragedy. Through a
remarkable disruption of both these primitive
artistic impulses, the ruin of Greek tragedy seemed
to be necessarily brought about: with which
process a degeneration and a transmutation of the
Greek national character was strictly in keeping,
summoning us to earnest reflection as to how
closely and necessarily art and the people, myth
and custom, tragedy and the state, have coalesced
in their bases. The ruin of tragedy was at the
same time the ruin of myth. Until then the
Greeks had been involuntarily compelled immedi-
ately to associate all experiences with their myths,
indeed they had to comprehend them only through
this association: whereby even the most immedi-
ate present necessarily appeared to them sub specie
CBterni and in a certain sense as timeless. Into
this current of the timeless, however, the state
as well as art plunged in order to find repose
from the burden and eagerness of the moment.
And a people—for the rest, also a man—is worth
just as much only as its ability to impress on its
experiences the seal of eternity: for it is thus, as
it were, desecularised, and reveals its unconscious
inner conviction of the relativity of time and of
the true, that is, the metaphysical significance of
life. The contrary happens when a people begins
to comprehend itself historically and to demolish
the mythical bulwarks around it: with which there
is usually connected a marked secularisation, a
breach with the unconscious metaphysics of its
earlier existence, in all ethical consequences.
Greek art and especially Greek tragedy delayed
M
## p. 178 (#222) ############################################
I78 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
above all the annihilation of myth: it was
necessary to annihilate these also to be able to
live detached from the native soil, unbridled in
the wilderness of thought, custom, and action.
Even in such circumstances this metaphysical
impulse still endeavours to create for itself a form
of apotheosis (weakened, no doubt) in the Socratism
of science urging to life: but on its lower stage
this same impulse led only to a feverish search,
which gradually merged into a pandemonium of
myths and superstitions accumulated from all
quarters: in the midst of which, nevertheless, the
Hellene sat with a yearning heart till he contrived,
as Graeculus, to mask his fever with Greek cheer-
fulness and Greek levity, or to narcotise himself
completely with some gloomy Oriental superstition.
We have approached this condition in the most
striking manner since the reawakening of the
Alexandro - Roman antiquity in the fifteenth
century, after a long, not easily describable, inter-
lude. On the heights there is the same ex-
uberant love of knowledge, the same insatiate
happiness of the discoverer, the same stupendous
secularisation, and, together with these, a homeless
roving about, an eager intrusion at foreign tables,
a frivolous deification of the present or a dull
senseless estrangement, all sub sped sceculi, of the
present time: which same symptoms lead one to
infer the same defect at the heart of this culture,
the annihilation of myth. It seems hardly
possible to transplant a foreign myth with perman-
ent success, without dreadfully injuring the tree
through this transplantation: which is perhaps
## p. 179 (#223) ############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDV. 179
occasionally strong enough and sound enough to
eliminate the foreign element after a terrible
struggle; but must ordinarily consume itself in
a languishing and stunted condition or in sickly
luxuriance. Our opinion of the pure and vigorous
kernel of the German being is such that we
venture to expect of it, and only of it, this elimina-
tion of forcibly ingrafted foreign elements, and we
deem it possible that the German spirit will reflect
anew on itself. Perhaps many a one will be of
opinion that this spirit must begin its struggle
with the elimination of the Romanic element: for
which it might recognise an external preparation
and encouragement in the victorious bravery and
bloody glory of the late war, but must seek the
inner constraint in the emulative zeal to be for
ever worthy of the sublime protagonists on this
path, of Luther as well as our great artists and
poets. But let him never think he can fight such
battles without his household gods, without his
mythical home, without a "restoration" of all
German things! And if the German should look
timidly around for a guide to lead him back to
his long-lost home, the ways and paths of which
he knows no longer—let him but listen to the
delightfully luring call of the Dionysian bird,
which hovers above him, and would fain point
out to him the way thither.
24.
Among the peculiar artistic effects of musical \
tragedy we had to emphasise an Apollonian
illusion, through which we are to be saved from
## p. 180 (#224) ############################################
l8o THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
immediate oneness with the Dionysian music,
while our musical excitement is able to discharge
itself on an Apollonian domain and in an inter-
posed visible middle world. It thereby seemed to
us that precisely through this discharge the middle
world of theatrical procedure, the drama generally,
became visible and intelligible from within in a
degree unattainable in the other forms of Apol-
lonian art: so that here, where this art was as it
were winged and borne aloft by the spirit of
music, we had to recognise the highest exaltation
of its powers, and consequently in the fraternal
union of Apollo and Dionysus the climax of the
Apollonian as well as of the Dionysian artistic
aims.
Of course, the Apollonian light-picture did not,
precisely with this inner illumination through
music, attain the peculiar effect of the weaker
grades of Apollonian art. What the epos and
the animated stone can do—constrain the con-
templating eye to calm delight in the world of
the individuatio—could not be realised here, not-
withstanding the greater animation and distinct-
ness. We contemplated the drama and penetrated
with piercing glance into its inner agitated world
of motives—and yet it seemed as if only a sym-
bolic picture passed before us, the profoundest
significance of which we almost believed we had
divined, and which we desired to put aside like a
curtain in order to behold the original behind it.
The greatest distinctness of the picture did not
suffice us: for it seemed to reveal as well as veil
something; and while it seemed, with its symbolic
## p. 181 (#225) ############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. l8l
revelation, to invite the rending of the veil for
„the disclosure of the mysterious background, this
illumined all-conspicuousness itself enthralled the
eye and prevented it from penetrating more deeply.
He who has not experienced this,—to have to
view, and at the same time to have a longing
beyond the viewing,—will hardly be able to con-
ceive how clearly and definitely these two processes
coexist in the contemplation of tragic myth and
are felt to be conjoined; while the truly aesthetic
spectators will confirm my assertion that among
the peculiar effects of tragedy this conjunction is
the most noteworthy. Now let this phenomenon
of the aesthetic spectator be transferred to an
analogous process in the tragic artist, and the
genesis of tragic myth will have been understood.
It shares with the Apollonian sphere of art the
full delight in appearance and contemplation, and
at the same time it denies this delight and finds
a still higher satisfaction in the annihilation of the |
visible world of appearance. The substance of
tragic myth is first of all an epic event involving ^
the glorification of the fighting hero: but whence
originates the essentially enigmatical trait, that
the suffering in the fate of the hero, the most
painful victories, the most agonising contrasts of
motives, in short, the exemplification of the wisdom
of Silenus, or, aesthetically expressed, the Ugly
and Discordant, is always represented anew in such
countless forms with such predilection, and pre-
cisely in the most youthful and exuberant age of
a people, unless there is really a higher delight
experienced in all this?
## p. 182 (#226) ############################################
182 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
For the fact that things actually take such a
tragic course would least of all explain the origin
of a form of art; provided that art is not merely
an imitation of the reality of nature, but Hi truth
. a metaphysical supplement, ro tne reality of nature,
placed alongside thereof lor its conquest. Iragic
myth, in so far as it really belongs to art, also
fully participates in this transfiguring metaphysical
purpose of art in general: wtiat does it trans-
figure, however, when it presents the phenomenal
world in the guise of the suffering hero? Least
of all the "reality" of this phenomenal world, for
it says to us: "Look at this! Look carefully!
It is your life! It is the hour-hand of your clock
of existence! "
l And myth has displayed this life, in order
ithereby to transfigure it to us? If not, how shall
we account for the aesthetic pleasure with which
we make even these representations pass before us?
I am inquiring concerning the aesthetic pleasure,
and am well aware that many of these representa-
tions may moreover occasionally create even a
moral delectation, say under the form of pity or
of a moral triumph. But he who would derive
the effect of the tragic exclusively from these
moral sources, as was usually the case far too long
in aesthetics, let him not think that he has done
anything for Art thereby; for Art must above all
insist on purity in her domain. For the explanation
of tragic myth the very first requirement is that
the pleasure which characterises it must be sought
in the purely aesthetic sphere, without encroaching
on the domain of pity, fear, or the morally-subjime.
## p. 183 (#227) ############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 183
How can the ugly and the discordant, the sub-
stance of tragic myth, excite an aesthetic pleasure?
Here it is necessary to raise ourselves with a
daring bound into a metaphysics of Art. I repeat,
therefore, my former proposition, that it is only
as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and
the world appear justified: and in this sense if is
precisely the function oftragic myth to convince
^us that even the Ugly and Discordant is an
artistic game which the will, in the eternal fulness
of its joy, plays with itself. But this not easily
comprehensible proto-phenomenon of Dionysian
Art becomes, in a direct way, singularly intelligible,
and is immediately apprehended in the wonder-
ful significance of musical dissonance: just as in
general it is music alone, placed in contrast to
the world, which can give us an idea as to what
is meant by the justification of the world as an
aesthetic phenomenon. The joy that the tragic
myth excites has the same origin as the joyful
sensation of dissonance in music. The Dionysian,
with its primitive joy experienced in pain itself, is
the common source of music and tragic myth.
Is it not possible that by calling to our aid the
musical relation of dissonance, the difficult problem
of tragic effect may have meanwhile been materi-
ally facilitated? For we now understand what it
means to wish to view tragedy and at the same
time to have a longing beyond the viewing: a frame
of mind, which, as regards the artistically employed
dissonance, we should simply have to characterise by
saying that we desire to hear and at the same time
have a longing beyond the hearing. That striving
## p. 184 (#228) ############################################
184 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
for the infinite, the pinion-flapping of longing, ac-
companying the highest delight in the clearly-
perceived reality, remind one that in both states we
have to recognise a Dionysian phenomenon, which
again and again reveals to us anew the playful up-
building and demolishing of the world of individuals
as the efflux of a primitive delight, in like manner
as when Heraclitus the Obscure compares the
world-building power to a playing child which
places stones here and there and builds sandhills
only to overthrow them again.
Hence, in order to form a true estimate of the
Dionysian capacity of a people, it would seem that
we must think not only of their music, but just as
much of their tragic myth, the second witness of
this capacity. Considering this most intimate
relationship between music and myth, we may now
in like manner suppose that a degeneration and
depravation of the one involves a deterioration of
the other: if it be true at all that the weakening
of the myth is generally expressive of a debilitation
of the Dionysian capacity. Concerning both, how-
ever, a glance at the development of the German
genius should not leave us in any doubt; in the
opera just as in the abstract character of our myth-
less existence, in an art sunk to pastime just as in
a life guided by concepts, the inartistic as well as
life-consuming nature of Socratic optimism had
revealed itself to us. Yet there have been indica-
tions to console us that nevertheless in some inac-
cessible abyss the German spirit still rests and
dreams, undestroyed, in glorious health, profundity,
and Dionysian strength, like a knight sunk in
## p. 185 (#229) ############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
185
slumber: from which abyss the Dionysian song
rises to us to let us know that this German knight
even still dreams his primitive Dionysian myth in
blissfully earnest visions. Let no one believe that
the German spirit has for ever lost its mythical home
when it still understands so obviously the voices of
the birds which tell of that home. Some day it
will find itself awake in all the morning freshness
of a deep sleep: then it will slay the dragons,
destroy the malignant dwarfs, and waken Brünn-
hilde—and Wotan's spear itself will be unable to
obstruct its course!
My friends, ye who believe in Dionysian music,
ye know also what tragedy means to us. There
we have tragic myth, born anew from music,—and
in this latest birth ye can hope for everything and
forget what is most afflicting. What is most afflict-
ing to all of us, however, is—the prolonged degrada-
tion in which the German genius has lived estranged
from house and home in the service of malignant
dwarfs. Ye understand my allusion—as ye will
also, in conclusion, understand my hopes.
25.
Music and tragic myth are equally the expression
of the Dionysian capacity of a people, and are
inseparable from each other. Both originate in
an ultra-Apollonian sphere of art;-both transfigure
a region in the delightful accords of which all dis-
sonance, just like the terrible picture of the world,
dies charmingly away ; both play with the sting of
displeasure, trusting to their most potent magic; 1
## p. 186 (#230) ############################################
186 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
both justify thereby the existence even of the
"worst world. "~ Here ffle" Uionysian, as compared
with the Apollonian, exhibits itself as the eternal
and original artistic force, which in general calls
into existence the entire world of phenomena: in
the midst of which a new transfiguring appearance
becomes necessary, in order to keep alive the ani-
mated world of individuation. If we could conceive
an incarnation of dissonance—and what is man but
that? —then, to be able to live this dissonance would
require a glorious illusion which would spread a
veil of beauty over its peculiar nature. This is the
true function of Apollo as deity of art: in whose
name we comprise all the countless manifestations
of the fair realm of illusion, which each moment
render life in general worth living and make one
impatient for the experience of the next moment.
At the same time, just as much of this basis of
all existence—the Dionysian substratum of the
world—is allowed to enter into the consciousness
of human beings, as can be surmounted again by
the Apollonian transfiguring power, so that these
two art-impulses are constrained to develop their
powers in strictly mutual proportion, according to
the law of eternal justice. When the Dionysian
powers rise with such vehemence as we experience
at present, there can be no doubt that, veiled in a
cloud, Apollo has already descended to us; whose
grandest beautifying influences a coming genera-
tion will perhaps behold.
That this effect is necessary, however, each one
would most surely perceive by intuition, if once he
found himself carried back—even in a dream—into
## p. 187 (#231) ############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 187
an Old-Hellenic existence. In walking under high
Ionic colonnades, looking upwards to a horizon
defined by clear and noble lines, with reflections of
his transfigured form by his side in shining marble,
and around him solemnly marching or quietly
moving men, with harmoniously sounding voices
and rhythmical pantomime, would he not in the
presence of this perpetual influx of beauty have to
raise his hand to Apollo and exclaim: "Blessed
race of Hellenes! How great Dionysus must be
among you,when the Delian god deems such charms
necessary to cure you of your dithyrambic mad-
ness ! "—To one in this frame of mind, however, an
aged Athenian, looking up to him with the sublime
eye of ^Eschylus, might answer: "Say also this,
thou curious stranger: what sufferings this people
must have undergone, in order to be able to become
thus beautiful! But now follow me to a tragic
play, and sacrifice with me in the temple of both
the deities 1"
## p. 188 (#232) ############################################
## p. 189 (#233) ############################################
APPENDIX.
[Late in the year 1888, not long before he was overcome by
his sudden attack of insanity, Nietzsche wrote down a
few notes concerning his early work, the Birth of
Tragedy, These were printed in his sister's biography
{Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches, vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 102 ff. ),
and are here translated as likely to be of interest to
readers of this remarkable work. They also appear in
the Ecce Homo. —Translator's Note. ]
"To be just to the Birth of Tragedy (1872), one
will have to forget some few things. It has
wrought effects, it even fascinated through that
wherein it was amiss—through its application to
Wagnerism, just as if this Wagnerism were symp-
tomatic of a rise and going up. And just on that
account was the book an event in Wagner's life:
from thence and only from thence were great
hopes linked to the name of Wagner. Even to-
day people remind me, sometimes right in the
midst of a talk on Parsifal, that / and none other
have it on my conscience that such a high opinion of
the cultural value of this movement came to the top.
More than once have I found the book referred
to as 'the Re-h\rth of Tragedy out of the Spirit
of Music': one only had an ear for a new formula
of Wagner's art, aim, task,—and failed to hear
## p. 190 (#234) ############################################
igO THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
withal what was at bottom valuable therein.
'Hellenism and Pessimism' had been a more
unequivocal title: namely, as a first lesson on the
way in which the Greeks got the better of pessi-
mism,—on the means whereby they overcame it
Tragedy simply proves that the Greeks were no
pessimists: Schopenhauer was mistaken here as
he was mistaken in all other things. Considered
with some neutrality, the Birth of Tragedy appears
very unseasonable: one would not even dream
that it was begun amid the thunders of the battle
of Worth. I thought these problems through and
through before the walls of Metz in cold September
nights, in the midst of the work of nursing the
sick; one might even believe the book to be fifty
years older. It is politically indifferent—un-
German one will say to-day,—it smells shockingly
Hegelian, in but a few formulae does it scent of
Schopenhauer's funereal perfume. An 'idea'—
the antithesis of' Dionysian versus Apollonian'—
translated into metaphysics; history itself as the
evolution of this 'idea'; the antithesis dissolved
into oneness in Tragedy; through this optics
things that had never yet looked into one another's
face, confronted of a sudden, and illumined and
comprehended through one another: for instance,
Opera and Revolution. The two decisive innova-
tions of the book are, on the one hand, the com-
prehension of the Dionysian phenomenon among
the Greeks (it gives the first psychology thereof,
it sees therein the One root of all Grecian art);
on the other, the comprehension of Socratism:
Socrates diagnosed for the first time as the tool
## p. 191 (#235) ############################################
APPENDIX. 191
of Grecian dissolution, as a typical decadent.
'Rationality' against instinct! ' Rationality' at
any price as a dangerous, as a life-undermining
force! Throughout the whole book a deep hostile
silence on Christianity: it is neither Apollonian
nor Dionysian; it negatives all aesthetic values
(the only values recognised by the Birth of
Tragedy), it is in the widest sense nihilistic,
whereas in the Dionysian symbol the utmost limit
of affirmation is reached. Once or twice the
Christian priests are alluded to as a 'malignant
kind of dwarfs,' as 'subterraneans. '"
"This beginning is singular beyond measure.
I had for my own inmost experience discovered
the only symbol and counterpart of history,—I had
just thereby been the first to grasp the wonderful
phenomenon of the Dionysian. And again, through
my diagnosing Socrates as a decadent, I had given
a wholly unequivocal proof of how little risk the
trustworthiness of my psychological grasp would
run of being weakened by some moralistic idiosyn-
crasy :—to view morality itself as a symptom of
decadence is an innovation, a novelty of the first
rank in the history of knowledge. How far I had
leaped in either case beyond the smug shallow-
pate-gossip of optimism contra pessimism! I
was the first to see the intrinsic antithesis: here,
the degenerating instinct which, with subterranean
vindictiveness, turns against life (Christianity, the
philosophy of Schopenhauer, in a certain sense
already the philosophy of Plato, all idealistic
## p. 192 (#236) ############################################
192 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
systems as typical forms), and there, a formula of
highest affirmation, born of fullness and overfull-
ness, a yea-saying without reserve to suffering's
self, to guilt's self, to all that is questionable and
strange in existence itself. This final, cheerfullest,
exuberantly mad-and-merriest Yea to life is not
only the highest insight, it is also the deepest, it
is that which is most rigorously confirmed and
upheld by truth and science. Naught that is, is
to be deducted, naught is dispensable; the phases
of existence rejected by the Christians and other
nihilists are even of an infinitely higher order
in the hierarchy of values than that which the
instinct of decadence sanctions, yea durst sanction.
To comprehend this courage is needed, and, as a
condition thereof, a surplus of strength: for pre-
cisely in degree as courage dares to thrust forward,
precisely according to the measure of strength,
does one approach truth. Perception, the yea-
saying to reality, is as much a necessity to the
strong as to the weak, under the inspiration of
weakness, cowardly shrinking, and flight from
reality—the 'ideal. ' . . . They are not free to
perceive: the decadents have need of the lie,—it is
one of their conditions of self-preservation. Whoso
not only comprehends the word Dionysian, but
also grasps his self in this word, requires no refu-
tation of Plato or of Christianity or of Schopen-
hauer—he smells the putrefaction''
3.
"To what extent I had just thereby found the
concept 'tragic,' the definitive perception of the
m
vitfk
## p. 193 (#237) ############################################
APPENDIX. 193
psychology of tragedy, I have but lately stated
in the Twilight of the Idols, page 139 (1st edit. ):
'The affirmation of life, even in its most unfamiliar j
and severe problems, the will to life, enjoying its
own inexhaustibility in the sacrifice of its highest
types,—that is what I called Dionysian, that is
what I divined as the bridge to a psychology of
the tragic poet.
Not in order to get rid of terror
and pity, not to purify from a dangerous passion
by its vehement discharge (it was thus that
Aristotle misunderstood it); but, beyond terror
and pity, to realise in fact the eternal delight of
becoming, that delight which even involves in itself
the joy of annihilating. ' * In this sense I have the
right to understand myself to be the first tragic
philosopher—that is, the utmost antithesis and
antipode to a pessimistic philosopher. Prior to
myself there is no such translation of the Dionysian
into the philosophic pathos: there lacks the tragic
wisdom,—I have sought in vain for an indication
thereof even among the great Greeks of philosophy,
the thinkers of the two centuries before Socrates.
A doubt still possessed me as touching Heraclitus,
in whose proximity I in general begin to feel
warmer and better than anywhere else. The
affirmation of transiency and annihilation, to wit
the decisive factor in a Dionysian philosophy, the
yea-saying to antithesis and war, to becoming, with
radical rejection even of the concept ' being',—that
I must directly acknowledge as, of all thinking
hitherto, the nearest to my own. The doctrine of
* Mr. Common's translation, pp. 227-28.
N
## p. 194 (#238) ############################################
194 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
'eternal recurrence,' that is, of the unconditioned
and infinitely repeated cycle of all things—this
doctrine of Zarathustra's might after all have been
already taught by Heraclitus. At any rate the
portico* which inherited well-nigh all its fundamental
conceptions from Heraclitus, shows traces thereof. "
A-
"In this book speaks a prodigious hope. In
fine, I see no reason whatever for taking back my
hope of a Dionysian future for music. Let us
cast a glance a century ahead, let us suppose my
assault upon two millenniums of anti-nature and
man-vilification succeeds! That new party of
life which will take in hand the greatest of all
tasks, the upbreeding of mankind to something
higher,—add thereto the relentless annihilation of
all things degenerating and parasitic, will again
make possible on earth that too-much of life, from
which there also must needs grow again the
Dionysian state. I promise a tragic age: the
highest art in the yea-saying to life, tragedy, will
be born anew, when mankind have behind them the
consciousness of the hardest but most necessary
wars, without suffering therefrom. A psychologist
might still add that what I heard in my younger
years in Wagnerian music had in general naught to
do with Wagner ; that when I described Wagnerian
music I described what / had heard, that I had
instinctively to translate and transfigure all into the
new spirit which I bore within myself. . . . "
## p. (#239) ################################################
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
: "3 9015 00588 7552
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
DATE DUE
APR 15 1990
DEL TEEM?
OCT
1990
SEP 27 1990
DEC-27: 1990. com
. - APR 18-1991
AUG LA
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
3 9015 00588 7552
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
DATE DUE
APR 85 1990
S 31 1350
COCA
1990
SEP 27 1990
DEC 27: 1990
APR 18-1991
POGLE
MAR 2 A 1996
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