Is there a pessi-
mism of strength?
mism of strength?
Nietzsche - v01 - Birth of Tragedy
Thus, if my
brother seems to lay particular stress upon the value
of rigorous training, free from all sentimentality, it
should be remembered that he speaks from experi-
ence in this respect. At Pforta he followed the
regular school course, and he did not enter a uni-
versity until the comparatively late age of twenty.
His extraordinary gifts manifested themselves
chiefly in his independent and private studies and
artistic efforts. As a boy his musical talent had
already been so noticeable, that he himself and other
competent judges were doubtful as to whether he
ought not perhaps to devote himself altogether to
music. It is, however, worth noting that everything
he did in his later years, whether in Latin, Greek, or
German work,bore the stamp of perfection—subject
of course to the limitation imposed upon him by his
years. His talents came very suddenly to the fore,
because he had allowed them to grow for such a
long time in concealment. His very first perform-
ance in philology, executed while he was a student
under Ritschl, the famous philologist, was also
typical of him in this respect, seeing that it was
ordered to be printed for the Rheinische Museum.
Of course this was done amid general and grave ex-
pressions of doubt; for, as Dr. Ritschl often declared,
J
## p. xiv (#24) #############################################
XIV INTRODUCTION.
it was an unheard-of occurrence for a student in his
third term to prepare such an excellent treatise.
Being a great lover of out-door exercise, such as
swimming, skating, and walking, he developed into a
very sturdy lad. Rohde gives the following descrip-
tion of him as a student: with his healthy com-
plexion,his outward and innercleanliness,hisaustere
chastity and his solemn aspect, he was the image of
that delightful youth described by Adalbert Stifter.
Though as a child he was always rather serious,
as a lad and a man he was ever inclined to see the
humorous side of things, while his whole being, and
everything he said or did, was permeated by an
extraordinary harmony. He belonged to the very
few who could control even a bad mood and conceal
it from others. All his friends are unanimous in
their praise of his exceptional evenness of temper
and behaviour, and his warm, hearty, and pleasant
laugh that seemed to come from the very depths
of his benevolent and affectionate nature. In him
it might therefore be said, nature had produced a
being who in body and spirit was a harmonious
whole: his unusual intellect was fully in keeping
with his uncommon bodily strength.
The only abnormal thing about him, and some-
thing which we both inherited from our father, was
short-sightedness, and this was very much aggra-
vated in my brother's case, even in his earliest school-
days, owing to that indescribable anxiety to learn
which always characterised him. When one listens
to accounts given by his friends and schoolfellows,
one is startled by the multiplicity of his studies even
in his schooldays.
## p. xv (#25) ##############################################
INTRODUCTION. XV
In the autumn of 1864, he began his university
life in Bonn, and studied philology and theology;
at the end of six months he gave up theology, and
in the autumn of 1865 followed his famous teacher
Ritschl to the University of Leipzig. There he
became an ardent philologist, and diligently sought
to acquire a masterly grasp of this branch of know-
ledge. But in this respect it would be unfair to
forget that the school of Pforta, with its staff of
excellent teachers — scholars that would have
adorned the chairs of any University—had already
afforded the best of preparatory trainings to any one
intending to take up philology as a study, more
particularly as it gave all pupils ample scope to
indulge any individual tastes they might have for
any particular branch of ancient history. The last
important Latin thesis which my brother wrote for
the Landes-Schule, Pforta, dealt with the Megarian
poet Theognis, and it was in the r61e of a lecturer
on this very subject that, on the 18th January
1866, he made his first appearance in public, before
the philological society he had helped to found in
Leipzig. The paper he read disclosed his investiga-
tions on the subject of Theognis the moralist and
aristocrat, who, as is well known, described and dis-
missed the plebeians of his time in terms of the
heartiest contempt. The aristocratic ideal, which
was always so dear to my brother, thus revealed
itself for the first time. Moreover, curiously enough,
it was precisely this scientific thesis which was the
cause of Ritschl's recognition of my brother and
fondness for him.
The whole of his Leipzig days proved of the
b
## p. xvi (#26) #############################################
XVI INTRODUCTION.
utmost importance to my brother's career. There
he was plunged into the very midst of a torrent
of intellectual influences which found an impression-
able medium in the fiery youth, and to which he
eagerly made himself accessible. He did not,
however, forget to discriminate among them, but
tested and criticised the currents of thought he
encountered, and selected accordingly. It is
certainly of great importance to ascertain what
those influences precisely were to which he yielded,
and how long they maintained their sway over him,
and it is likewise necessary to discover exactly
when the matured mind threw off these fetters in
order to work out its own salvation.
The influences that exercised power over him
in those days may be described in the three follow-
ing terms: Hellenism, Schopenhauer,Wagner. His
love of Hellenism certainly led him to philology;
but, as a matter of fact, what concerned him most
was to obtain a wide view of things in general,
and this he hoped to derive from that science;
philology in itself, with his splendid method and
thorough way of going to work, served him only
as a means to an end.
If Hellenism was the first strong influence which
already in Pforta obtained a sway over my brother,
in the winter of 1865-66, a completely new, and
therefore somewhat subversive, influence was intro-
duced into his life with Schopenhauer's philosophy.
When he reached Leipzig in the autumn of 1865,
he was very downcast; for the experiences that
had befallen him during his one year of student
life in Bonn had deeply depressed him. He had
## p. xvii (#27) ############################################
INTRODUCTION. XVII
sought at first to adapt himself to his surround-
ings there, with the hope of ultimately elevating
them to his lofty views on things; but both these
efforts proved vain, and now he had come to
Leipzig with the purpose of framing his own
manner of life. It can easily be imagined how
the first reading of Schopenhauer's The World as
Will and Idea worked upon this man, still sting-
ing from the bitterest experiences and disappoint-
ments. He writes: "Here I saw a mirror in
which I espied the world, life, and my own nature
depicted with frightful grandeur. " As my brother,
from his very earliest childhood, had always missed
both the parent and the educator through our
father's untimely death, he began to regard
Schopenhauer with almost filial love and respect.
He did not venerate him quite as other men did;
Schopenhauer's personality was what attracted and
enchanted him. From the first he was never
blind to the faults in his master's system, and in
proof of this we have only to refer to an essay he
wrote in the autumn of 1867, which actually con-
tains a criticism of Schopenhauer's philosophy.
Now, in the autumn of 1865, to these two
influences, Hellenism and Schopenhauer, a third
influence was added—one which was to prove the
strongest ever exercised over my brother—and it
began with his personal introduction to Richard
Wagner. He was introduced to Wagner by the
latter's sister, Frau Professor Brockhaus, and his
description of their first meeting, contained in a
letter to Erwin Rohde, is really most affecting.
For years, that is to say, from the time Bulow's
## p. xviii (#28) ###########################################
XV111 INTRODUCTION.
arrangement of Tristan and Isolde for thepianoforte,
had appeared, he had already been a passionate
admirer of Wagner's music; but now that the
artist himself entered upon the scene of his life,
with the whole fascinating strength of his strong
will, my brother felt that he was in the presence
of a being whom he, of all modern men, resembled
most in regard to force of character.
Again, in the case of Richard Wagner, my
brother, from the first, laid the utmost stress upon
the man's personality, and could only regard his
works and views as an expression of the artist's
whole being, despite the fact that he by no means
understood every one of those works at that time.
My brother was the first who ever manifested
such enthusiastic affection for Schopenhauer and
Wagner, and he was also the first of that numer-
ous band of young followers who ultimately in-
scribed the two great names upon their banner.
Whether Schopenhauer and Wagner ever really
corresponded to the glorified pictures my brother
painted of them, both in his letters and other
writings, is a question which we can no longer
answer in the affirmative. Perhaps what he saw
in them was only what he himself wished to be
some day.
The amount of work my brother succeeded in
accomplishing, during his student days, really
seems almost incredible. When we examine his
record for the years 1865-67, we can scarcely
believe it refers to only two years' industry, for
at a guess no one would hesitate to suggest four
years at least. But in those days, as he himself
## p. xix (#29) #############################################
INTRODUCTION. XIX
declares, he still possessed the constitution of a
bear. He knew neither what headaches nor in-
digestion meant, and, despite his short sight, his
eyes were able to endure the greatest strain with-
out giving him the smallest trouble. That is why,
regardless of seriously interrupting his studies, he
was so glad at the thought of becoming a soldier
in the forthcoming autumn of 1867; for he was
particularly anxious to discover some means of
employing his bodily strength.
He discharged his duties as a soldier with the
utmost mental and physical freshness, was the
crack rider among the recruits of his year, and
was sincerely sorry when, owing to an accident,
he was compelled to leave the colours before the
completion of his service. As a result of this
accident he had his first dangerous illness.
While mounting his horse one day, the beast,
which was an uncommonly restive one, suddenly
reared, and, causing him to strike his chest sharply
against the pommel of the saddle, threw him to
the ground. My brother then made a second
attempt to mount, and succeeded this time, not-
withstanding the fact that he had severely sprained
and torn two muscles in his chest, and had seri-
ously bruised the adjacent ribs. For a whole day
he did his utmost to pay no heed to the injury,
and to overcome the pain it caused him; but in
the end he only swooned, and a dangerously acute
inflammation of the injured tissues was the result.
Ultimately he was obliged to consult the famous
specialist, Professor Volkmann, in Halle, who
quickly put him right.
## p. xx (#30) ##############################################
XX INTRODUCTION.
In October 1868, my brother returned to his
studies in Leipzig with double joy. These were
his plans: to get his doctor's degree as soon as
possible; to proceed to Paris, Italy, and Greece,
make a lengthy stay in each place, and then
to return to Leipzig in order to settle there as a
privat docent. All these plans were, however,
suddenly frustrated owing to his premature call
to the University of Bale, where he was invited
to assume the duties of professor. Some of the
philological essays he had written in his student
days, and which were published by the Rheinische
Museum, had attracted the attention of the
Educational Board at Bale. Ratsherr Wilhelm
Vischer, as representing this body, appealed to
Ritschl for fuller information. Now Ritschl, who
had early recognised my brother's extraordinary
talents, must have written a letter of such enthusi-
astic praise (" Nietzsche is a genius: he can do
whatever he chooses to put his mind to"), that
one of the more cautious members of the council
is said to have observed: "If the proposed
candidate be really such a genius, then it were
better did we not appoint him; for, in any case,
he would only stay a short time at the little
University of Bile. " My brother ultimately
accepted the appointment, and, in view of his
published philological works, he was immediately
granted the doctor's degree by the University of
Leipzig. He was twenty-four years and six
months old when he took up his position as
professor in Bale,—and it was with a heavy heart
that he proceeded there, for he knew "the golden
## p. xxi (#31) #############################################
INTRODUCTION. XXI
period of untrammelled activity " must cease. He
was, however, inspired by the deep wish of being
able "to transfer to his pupils some of that
Schopenhauerian earnestness which is stamped
on the brow of the sublime man. " "I should like
to be something more than a mere trainer of
capable philologists: the present generation of
teachers, the care of the growing broods,—all this
is in my mind. If we must live, let us at least
do so in such wise that others may bless our life
once we have been peacefully delivered from its
toils. "
When I look back upon that month of May
1869, and ask both of friends and of myself, what
the figure of this youthful University professor of
four-and-twenty meant to the world at that time,
the reply is naturally, in the first place: that he
was one of Ritschl's best pupils ; secondly, that he
was an exceptionally capable exponent of classical
antiquity with a brilliant career before him; and
thirdly, that he was a passionate adorer of Wagner
and Schopenhauer. But no one has any idea of
my brother's independent attitude to the science
he had selected, to his teachers and to his ideals,
and he deceived both himself and us when he
passed as a " disciple" who really shared all the
views of his respected master.
On the 28th May 1869, my brother delivered
his inaugural address at Bale University, and it is
said to have deeply impressed the authorities.
The subject of the address was "Homer and
Classical Philology. "
Musing deeply, the worthy councillors and
## p. xxii (#32) ############################################
xxu
INTRODUCTION.
professors walked homeward. What had they
just heard? A young scholar discussing the very
justification of his own science in a cool and
philosophically critical spirit! A man able to
impart so much artistic glamour to his subject,
that the once stale and arid study of philology
suddenly struck them—and they were certainly
not impressionable men—as the messenger of the
gods: "and just as the Muses descended upon the
dull and tormented Boeotian peasants, so phil-
ology comes into a world full of gloomy colours and
pictures, full of the deepest, most incurable woes,
and speaks to men comfortingly of the beautiful
and brilliant godlike figure of a distant, blue, and
happy fairyland. "
"We have indeed got hold of a rare bird,
Herr Ratsherr," said one of these gentlemen to
his companion, and the latter heartily agreed, for
my brother's appointment had been chiefly his
doing.
Even in Leipzig, it was reported that Jacob
Burckhardt had said: "Nietzsche is as much an
artist as a scholar. " Privy-Councillor Ritschl
told me of this himself, and then he added, with
a smile: "I always said so; he can make his
scientific discourses as palpitatingly interesting as
a French novelist his novels. "
"Homer and Classical Philology" — my
brother's inaugural address at the University—
was by no means the first literary attempt
he had made; for we have already seen that
he had had papers published by the Rheinische
Museum; still, this particular discourse is import-
## p. xxiii (#33) ###########################################
INTRODUCTION. XXlii
ant, seeing that it practically contains the pro-
gramme of many other subsequent essays. I
must, however, emphasise this fact here, that
neither "Homer and Classical Philology," nor
The Birth of Tragedy^ represents a beginning
in my brother's career. It is really surprising to
see how very soon he actually began grappling
with the questions which were to prove the
problems of his life. If a beginning to his
intellectual development be sought at all, then
it must be traced to the years 1865-67 in
Leipzig. The Birth of Tragedy, his maiden
attempt at book-writing, with which he began his
twenty-eighth year, is the last link of a long
chain of developments, and the first fruit that was
a long time coming to maturity. Nietzsche's
was a polyphonic nature, in which the most
different and apparently most antagonistic tal-
ents had come together. Philosophy, art, and
science—in the form of philology, then—each
certainly possessed a part of him. The most
wonderful feature — perhaps it might even be
called the real Nietzschean feature — of this
versatile creature, was the fact that no eternal
strife resulted from the juxtaposition of these
inimicial traits, that not one of them strove to
dislodge, or to get the upper hand of, the others.
When Nietzsche renounced the musical career, in
order to devote himself to philology, and gave
himself up to the most strenuous study, he did
not find it essential completely to suppress his
other tendencies: as before, he continued both to
compose and derive pleasure from music, and
## p. xxiv (#34) ############################################
XXIV INTRODUCTION.
even studied counterpoint somewhat seriously.
Moreover, during his years at Leipzig, when he
consciously gave himself up to philological re-
search, he began to engross himself in Schopen-
hauer, and was thereby won by philosophy for
ever. Everything that could find room took up
its abode in him, and these juxtaposed factors,
far from interfering with one another's existence,
were rather mutually fertilising and stimulating.
All those who have read the first volume of the
biography with attention must have been struck
with the perfect way in which the various impulses
in his nature combined in the end to form one
general torrent, and how this flowed with ever
greater force in the direction of a single goal.
I^. --. Thus science, art, and philosophy developed and
became ever more closely related in him, until,
in The Birth of Tragedy, they brought forth a
"centaur," that is to say, a work which would
have been an impossible achievement to a man
with only a single, special talent. This polyphony
of different talents, all coming to utterance
together and producing the richest and boldest
of harmonies, is the fundamental feature not only
of Nietzsche's early days, but of his whole
development. It is once again the artist,
philosopher, and man of science, who as one
man in later years, after many wanderings, re-
cantations, and revulsions of feeling, produces
that other and rarer Centaur of highest rank—
Zarathustra.
The Birth of Tragedy requires perhaps a little
explaining—more particularly as we have now
## p. xxv (#35) #############################################
INTRODUCTION. XXV
ceased to use either Schopenhauerian or Wagnerian
terms of expression. And it was for this reason
that five years after its appearance, my brother
wrote an introduction to it, in which he very
plainly expresses his doubts concerning the views
it contains, and the manner in which they are
presented. The kernel of its thought he always
recognised as perfectly correct; and all he de-
plored in later days was that he had spoiled the
grand problem of Hellenism, as he understood it,
by adulterating it with ingredients taken from the
world of most modern ideas. As time went on, he
grew ever more and more anxious to define the
deep meaning of this book with greater precision
and clearness. A very good elucidation of its
aims, which unfortunately was never published,
appears among his notes of the year 1886, and
is as follows:—
"Concerning The Birtk of Tragedy. —A book
consisting of mere experiences relating to pleasur-
able and unpleasurable aesthetic states, with a
metaphysico-artistic background. At the same
time the confession of a romanticist {the sufferer
feels the deepest longing for beauty—he begets it);
finally, a product of youth, full of youthful courage
and melancholy. , .
"Fundamental psychological experiences: the 1
word 'Apollonian' stands for that state of rapt
repose in the presefice ot a visionary world, in the
presence of the world of beautiful appearance
"designed as a deliverance from becoming: the_
word DiohysosT on the other hand, stands for
strenuous becoming, grown self-conscious, in the
## p. xxvi (#36) ############################################
xxvi
INTRODUCTION.
form of the rampant voluptuousness of the creator,
who is also perfectly conscious of the violent anger
of the destroyer.
"The antagonism of these two attitudes and
the desires that underlie them. The first-named
would have the vision it conjures up eternal : in
its light man must be quiescent, apathetic, peace-
ful, healed, and on friendly terms with himself and
all existence; the second strives after creation,
after the voluptuousness of wilful creation, il.
constructing and destroying. Creation felt and
explained as an instinct would be merely the
a nini unremitting inventive action of a dissatisfied
donec being, overflowing with wealth and living at high
tension and high pressure,—of a God who would
overcome the sorrows of existence by means_
only of continual changes and transformations,
iete
appearance as a transient and momentary deliver-
ance; the world as an apparent sequence of
godlike visions and deliverances.
“This metaphysico-artistic attitude is opposed
to Schopenhauer's one-sided view, which values
art, not from the artist's standpoint but from the
spectator's, because it brings salvation and deliver-
ance by means of the joy produced by unreal as
opposed to the existing or the real (the experi-
ence only of him who is suffering and is in
despair owing to himself and everything existing).
-Deliverance in the form and its eternity (just as
Plato may have pictured it, save that he rejoiced
in a complete subordination of all too excitable
sensibilities, even in the idea itself). To this is
opposed the second point of view-art regarded
## p. xxvii (#37) ###########################################
INTRODUCTION.
xxvii
as a phenomenon of the artist, above all of the
musician: the torture of being obliged to create,
as a Dionysian instinct.
“Tragic art, rich in both attitudes, represents
the reconciliation of. Apollo and Dionysos.
Appearance is given the greatest importance by
Dionysos; and yet it will be denied and cheerfully.
denied. This is directed against Schopenhauer's
teaching of Resignation as the tragic attitude
towards the world.
“ Against Wagner's theory that music is a
means and drama an end.
“A desire for tragic myth (for religion and even
pessimistic religion) as for a forcing frame in
which certain plants flourish.
"Mistrust of science, although its ephemerally
soothing optimism be strongly felt; the serenity'
of the theoretical man.
“ Deep antagonism to Christianity. Why?
The degeneration of the Germanic spirit is ascribed
to its influence.
“ Any justification of the world can only be
an æsthetic one. Profound suspicions about
morality ( it is part and parcel of the world of
appearance).
"The happiness of existence is only possible as
the happiness derived from appearance. (Being
is a fiction invented by those who suffer from
becoming. )
"Happiness in becoming is possible only in
the annihilation of the real, of the existing,
of the beautifully visionary,-in the pessimistic
dissipation of illusions :—with the annihilation
hotia
## p. xxviii (#38) ##########################################
XXVlil INTRODUCTION.
of the most beautiful phenomena in the world
of,. appearance, Dionysian happiness reaches it?
. zenith. """ *! '
'l he Utrth of Tragedy is really only a portion
of a much greater work on Hellenism, which my
brother had always had in view from the time
of his student days. But even the portion it
represents was originally designed upon a much
larger scale than the present one; the reason
probably being, that Nietzsche desired only to be
of service to Wagner. When a certain portion
of the projected work on Hellenism was ready
and had received the title Greek Cheerfulness,
my brother happened to call upon Wagner at
Tribschen in April 1871, and found him very
low-spirited in regard to the mission of his life.
My brother was very anxious to take some decis-
ive step to help him, and, laying the plans of his
great work on Greece aside, he selected a small
portion from the already completed manuscript
—a portion dealing with one distinct side of
Hellenism,—to wit, its tragic art. He then
associated Wagner's music with it and the name
Dionysos, and thus took the first step towards
that world-historical view through which we have
since grown accustomed to regard Wagner.
From the dates of the various notes relating
to it, The Birth of Tragedy must have been written
between the autumn of 1869 and November
1871—a period during which " a mass of aesthetic
questions and answers" was fermenting in
Nietzsche's mind. It was first published in
January 1872 by E. W. Fritsch, in Leipzig,
## p. xxix (#39) ############################################
INTRODUCTION.
xxix
under the title The Birth of Tragedy out of
the Spirit of Music. Later on the title was
changed to The Birth of Tragedy, or Hellenism
and Pessimism.
ELIZABETH FÖRSTER-NIETZSCHE.
WEIMAR, September 1905.
## p. xxx (#40) #############################################
1
## p. 1 (#41) ###############################################
AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-
CRITICISM.
i.
Whatever may lie at the bottom of this doubt-
ful book must be a questionpof the first rank
and attractiveness, moreover a deeply personal
question,—in proof thereof observe the time
in which it originated, in spite of which it origin-
ated, the exciting period of the Franco-German
war of 1870-71. While the thunder of the
battle of Worth rolled over Europe, the ruminator
and riddle-lover, who had to be the parent of this
book, sat somewhere in a nook of the Alps, lost in
riddles and ruminations, consequently very much
concerned and unconcerned at the same time, and
wrote down his meditations on the Greeks,—the
kernel of the curious and almost inaccessible book,
to which this belated prologue (or epilogue) is to
be devoted. A few weeks later: and he found
himself under the walls of Metz, still wrestling
with the notes of interrogation he had set down
concerning the alleged " cheerfulness " of the Greeks
and of Greek art; till at last, in that month of
A
## p. 2 (#42) ###############################################
2 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
'•,
deep suspense, when peace was debated at Ver-
sailles, he too attained to peace with himself, and,
slowly recovering from a disease brought home
from the field, made up his mind definitely re-
garding the "Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of
Music! '—From music? Music and Tragedy?
Greeks and tragic music? Greeks and the Art-
work of pessimism? A race of men, well-fashioned,
beautiful, envied, life-inspiring, like no other race
hitherto, the Greeks—indeed? The Greeks were
in need of tragedy? Yea—of art? Wherefore—
. \ Greek art? . . .
,('. *fci We can thus guess where the great note of
interrogation concerning the value of existence
had been set. Is pessimism necessarily the sign
of decline, of decay, of failure, of exhausted and
weakened instincts? —as was the case with the
Indians, as is, to all appearance, the case with us
"modern" men and Europeans?
Is there a pessi-
mism of strength? An intellectual predilection for
what is hard, awful, evil, problematical in exist-
ence, owing to well-being, to exuberant health, to
fullness of existence? Is there perhaps suffering
in overfullness itself? A seductive fortitude with
the keenest of glances, which yearns for the
terrible, as for the enemy, the worthy enemy, with
whom it may try its strength? from whom it is
willing to learn what "fear" is? What means
tragic myth to the Greeks of the best, strongest,
bravest era? And the prodigious phenomenon of
the Dionysian? And that which was born there-
of, tragedy ? —And again: that of which tragedy
died, the Socratism of morality, the dialectics,
## p. 3 (#43) ###############################################
AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. 3
contentedness and cheerfulness of the theoretical
man—indeed? might not this very Socratism be
a sign of decline, of weariness, of disease, of
anarchically disintegrating instincts? And the
"Hellenic cheerfulness" of the later Hellenism
merely a glowing sunset? The Epicurean will
counter to pessimism merely a precaution of the
sufferer? And science itself, our science—ay,
viewed as a symptom of life, what really signifies
all science? Whither, worse still, whence—all
science? Well? Is scientism perhaps only fear
and evasion of pessimism? A subtle defence
against—truth} Morally speaking, something
like falsehood and cowardice? And, unmorally
speaking, an artifice? O Socrates, Socrates, was
this perhaps thy secret? Oh mysterious ironist,
was this perhaps thine—irony? . . .
2.
What I then laid hands on, something terrible
and dangerous, a problem with horns, not neces-
sarily a bull itself, but at all events a new problem:
I should say to-day it was the problem of science
itself—science conceived for the first time as prob-
lematic, as questionable. But the book, in which
my youthful ardour and suspicion then discharged
themselves—what an impossible book must needs
grow out of a task so disagreeable to youth. Con-
structed of nought but precocious, unripened self-
experiences, all of which lay close to the threshold
of the communicable, based on the groundwork of
## p. 4 (#44) ###############################################
4 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
art—for the problem of science cannot be discerned
on the groundwork of science,—a book perhaps for
artists, with collateral analytical and retrospective
aptitudes (that is, an exceptional kind of artists,
for whom one must seek and does not even care
to seek . . . ), full of psychological innovations and
artists' secrets, with an artists' metaphysics in the
background, a work of youth, full of youth's mettle
and youth's melancholy, independent, defiantly
self-sufficient even when it seems to bow to some
authority and self-veneration; in short, a firstling-
work, even in every bad sense of the term; in
spite of its senile problem, affected with every
fault of youth, above all with youth's pro-
lixity and youth's "storm and stress": on the
other hand, in view of the success it had (especi-
ally with the great artist to whom it addressed
itself, as it were, in a duologue, Richard Wagner)
a demonstrated book, I mean a book which, at any
rate, sufficed "for the best of its time. " On this
account, if for no other reason, it should be treated
with some consideration and reserve; yet I shall
not altogether conceal how disagreeable it now
appears to me, how after sixteen years it stands a
total stranger before me,—before an eye which is
more mature, and a hundred times more fastidious,
but which has by no means grown colder nor lost
any of its interest in that self-same task essayed
for the first time by this daring book,—to view
science through the optics of the artist, and art more-
over through the optics of life. , , .
## p. 5 (#45) ###############################################
AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM.
I say again, to-day it is an impossible book to
me,—I call it badly written, heavy, painful, image-
angling and image-entangling, maudlin, sugared
at times even to femininism, uneven in tempo,
void of the will to logical cleanliness, very con-
vinced and therefore rising above the necessity of
demonstration, distrustful even of the propriety of
demonstration, as being a book for initiates, as
"music" for those who are baptised with the
name of Music, who are united from the beginning
of things by common ties of rare experiences in
art, as a countersign for blood-relations in artibus,
—a haughty and fantastic book, which from the
very first withdraws even more from the pro-
fanum valgus of the "cultured" than from the
"people," but which also, as its effect has shown
and still shows, knows very well how to seek
fellow-enthusiasts and lure them to new by-ways
and dancing-grounds. Here, at any rate—thus
much was acknowledged with curiosity as well
as with aversion—a strange voice spoke, the
disciple of a still "unknown God," who for the
time being had hidden himself under the hood
of the scholar, under the German's gravity and
disinclination for dialectics, even under the bad
manners of the Wagnerian; here was a spirit
with strange and still nameless needs, a memory
bristling with questions, experiences and obscur-
ities, beside which stood the name Dionysos like
one more note of interrogation; here spoke—
people said to themselves with misgivings—some-
## p. 6 (#46) ###############################################
6 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
,,' -
:•,
thing like a mystic and almost maenadic soul,
which, undecided whether it should disclose or
conceal itself, stammers with an effort and caprici-
ously as in a strange tongue. It should have
sung, this "new soul"—and not spoken! What
a pity, that I did not dare to say what I then had
to say, as a poet: I could have done so perhaps!
Or at least as a philologist:—for even at the
present day well-nigh everything in this domain
remains to be discovered and disinterred by the
philologist! Above all the problem, that here
there is a problem before us,—and that, so long
as we have no answer to the question " what is
Dionysian? " the Greeks are now as ever wholly
unknown and inconceivable . . .
Ay, what is Dionysian ? —In this book may be
found an answer,—a " knowing one" speaks here,
the votary and disciple of his god. Perhaps I
should now speak more guardedly and less elo-
quently of a psychological question so difficult as
,<•>*! the origin of tragedy among the Greeks. A
__furidamental question is the relation of the Greek
to pain, his degree qf sensibility,—did this relation
. remain constant? or did it veer about ? —the ques-
tion, whether his ever-increasing longing. for beauty,
for festivals, gaieties, new cults, did really grow
out of want, privation, melancholy, pain? For
suppose even this to be true—and Pericles (or
Thucydides) intimates as much in the great
Funeral Speech:—whence then the opposite
## p. 7 (#47) ###############################################
AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM.
i
longing, which appeared first in the order of time,
the longing for the ugly, the good, resolute desire
of the Old Hellene for pessimism, for tragic myth,
for the picture of all that is terrible, evil, enig-
matical, destructive, fatal at the basis of existence,
-whence then must tragedy have sprung? Per-
haps from joy, from strength, from exuberant health,
from over-fullness. And what then, physiologic-
ally speaking, is the meaning of that madness,
out of which comic as well as tragic art has
grown, the Dionysian madness? What? perhaps
madness is not necessarily the symptom of
degeneration, of decline, of belated culture ?
Perhaps there are—a question for alienists—
neuroses of health? of folk-youth and -youthful-
ness? What does that synthesis of god and goat
in the Satyr point to? What self-experience
what "stress," made the Greek think of the
Dionysian reveller and primitive man as a satyr?
And as regards the origin of the tragic chorus:
perhaps there were endemic ecstasies in the eras
when the Greek body bloomed and the Greek
soul brimmed over with life? Visions and hallu-
cinations, which took hold of entire communities,
entire cult-assemblies ? What if the Greeks in the
very wealth of their youth had the will to be tragic
and were pessimists? What if it was madness
itself, to use a word of Plato's, which brought the
greatest blessings upon Hellas? And what if,
on the other hand and conversely, at the very
time of their dissolution and weakness, the Greeks
became always more optimistic, more superficial,
more histrionic, also more ardent for logic and the
## p. 8 (#48) ###############################################
8 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
logicising of the world,—consequently at the same
time more "cheerful" and more "scientific"?
Ay, despite all "modern ideas" and prejudices
of the democratic taste, may not the triumph of
optimism, the common sense that has gained the
upper hand, the practical and theoretical utilitar-
ianism, like democracy itself, with which it is
synchronous—be symptomatic of declining vigour,
of approaching age, of physiological weariness?
/And not at all—pessimism? Was Epicurus an
( optimist—because a sufferer? . . . We see it is a
whole bundle of weighty questions which this book
has taken upon itself,—let us not fail to add its
weightiest question! Viewed through the optics
/ of life, what is the meaning of—morality? . . .
5.
Already in the foreword to Richard Wagner,
art—and not morality—is set down as the properly
metaphysical activity of man; in the book itself
the piquant proposition recurs time and again,
that the existence of the world is justified only as
an aesthetic phenomenon. Indeed, the entire book
recognises only an artist-thought and artist-after-
thought behind all occurrences,—a "God," if you
will, but certainly only an altogether thoughtless
and unmoral artist-God, who, in construction as
in destruction, in good as in evil, desires to
become conscious of his own equable joy and
sovereign glory; who, in creating worlds, frees
himself from the anguish of fullness and overfull-
ness, from the suffering of the contradictions con-
## p. 9 (#49) ###############################################
AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. 9
centrated within him. The world, that is, the
redemption of God attained at every moment, as
the perpetually changing, perpetually new vision
of the most suffering, most antithetical, most
contradictory being, who contrives to redeem him-
self only in appearance: this entire artist-meta-
physics, call it arbitrary, idle, fantastic, if you
will,—the point is, that it already betrays a spirit,
which is determined some day, at all hazards, to
make a stand against the moral interpretation
and significance of life. Here, perhaps for the
first time, a pessimism "Beyond Good and Evil"
announces itself, here that "perverseness of dis-
position" obtains expression and formulation,
against which Schopenhauer never grew tired of
hurling beforehand his angriest imprecations and
thunderbolts,—a philosophy which dares to put,
derogatorily put, morality itself in the world of
phenomena, and not only among "phenomena"
(in the sense of the idealistic terminus technicus),
but among the "illusions," as appearance, sem-
blance, error, interpretation, accommodation, art.
Perhaps the depth of this antimoral tendency may
be best estimated from the guarded and hostile'!
silence with which Christianity is treated through-
out this book,—Christianity, as being the most
extravagant burlesque of the moral theme to which
mankind has hitherto been obliged to listen. In
fact, to the purely aesthetic world-interpretation
and justification taught in this book, there is no
greater antithesis than the Christian dogma, which
is only and will be only moral, and which, with
its absolute standards, for instance, its truthfulness
## p. 10 (#50) ##############################################
IO THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
of God, relegates — that is, disowns, convicts,
condemns—art, all art, to the realm of falsehood.
Behind such a mode of thought and valuation,
which, if at all genuine, must be hostile to art,
I always experienced what was hostile to life, the
wrathful, vindictive counterwill to life itself: for
all life rests on appearance, art, illusion, optics,
necessity of perspective and error. From the very
first Christianity was, essentially and thoroughly,
the nausea and surfeit of Life for Life, which only
disguised, concealed and decked itself out under
the belief in "another" or "better" life. The
(hatred of the "world," the curse on the affections,
;the fear of beauty and sensuality, another world,
1'invented for the purpose of slandering this world
the more, at bottom a longing for Nothingness,
for the end, for rest, for the " Sabbath of Sabbaths"
—all this, as also the unconditional will of
Christianity to recognise only moral values, has
always appeared to me as the most dangerous
and ominous of all possible forms of a "will to
perish"; at the least, as the symptom of a most
fatal disease,of profoundest weariness, despondency,
>. exhaustion, impoverishment of life,—for before
the tribunal of morality (especially Christian, that
is, unconditional morality) life must constantly
and inevitably be the loser, because life is some-
thing essentially unmoral, — indeed, oppressed
iwith the weight of contempt and the everlasting
No, life must finally be regarded as unworthy of
desire, as in itself unworthy. Morality itself
what? —may not morality be a "will to disown
1 life," a secret instinct for annihilation, a principle
## p. 11 (#51) ##############################################
AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. II
of decay, of depreciation, of slander, a beginning
of the end? And, consequently, the danger of
dangers? . . . It was against morality, therefore,
that my instinct, as an intercessory instinct for
life, turned in this questionable book, inventing
for itself a fundamental counter - dogma and \
counter-valuation of life, purely artistic, purely \
anti-Christian. What should I call it? As a
philologist and man of words I baptised it, not
without some liberty—for who could be sure of the I
proper name of the Antichrist ? —with the name of /
a Greek god: I called it Dionysian. /
6.
You see which problem I ventured to touch upon
in this early work? . . . How I now regret, that I
had not then the courage (or immodesty ? ) to allow
myself, in all respects, the use of an individual
language for such individual contemplations and
ventures in the field of thought—that I laboured to
express, in Kantian and Schopenhauerian formulae,
strange and new valuations, which ran fundament-
ally counter to the spirit of Kant and Schopen-
hauer, as well as to their taste! What, forsooth,
were Schopenhauer's views on tragedy ? " What
gives". —he says in Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,
II. 495—"to all tragedy that singular swing
towards elevation, is the awakening of the know-
ledge that the world, that life, cannot satisfy
us thoroughly, and consequently is not worthy of
our attachment. In this consists the tragic spirit:
it therefore leads to resignation. " Oh, how
>i'
## p. 12 (#52) ##############################################
12 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
differently Dionysos spoke to me! Oh how fai
from me then was just this entire resignationism!
—But there is something far worse in this book,
which I now regret even more than having
obscured and spoiled Dionysian anticipations with
Schopenhauerian formulae: to wit, that, in general,
I spoiled the grand Hellenic problem, as it had
opened up before me, by the admixture of the
most modern things! That I entertained hopes,
where nothing was to be hoped for, where every-
thing pointed all-too-clearly to an approaching
end! That, on the basis of our latter-day
German music, I began to fable about the
"spirit of Teutonism," as if it were on the point
of discovering and returning to itself,—ay, at the
very time that the German spirit which not so
very long before had had the will to the lordship
over Europe, the strength to lead and govern
Europe, testamentarily and conclusively resigned
and, under the pompous pretence of empire-found-
ing, effected its transition to mediocritisation,
democracy, and "modern ideas. " In very fact,
I have since learned to regard this "spirit
of Teutonism" as something to be despaired
of and unsparingly treated, as also our present
German music, which is Romanticism through and
through and the most un-Grecian of all possible
forms of art: and moreover a first-rate nerve-
destroyer, doubly dangerous for a people given
to drinking and revering the unclear as a virtue,
namely, in its two-fold capacity of an intoxi-
cating and stupefying narcotic. Of course, apart
from all precipitate hopes and faulty applications
## p. 13 (#53) ##############################################
AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. 13
to matters specially modern, with which I then
spoiled my first book, the great Diortysian note
of interrogation, as set down therein, continues
standing on and on, even with reference to music:
how must we conceive of a music, which is no longer
of Romantic origin, like the German; but of
Dionysian? . . .
7.
—But, my dear Sir, if your book is not Roman-
ticism, what in the world is? Can the deep hatred
of the present, of " reality" and " modern ideas"
be pushed farther than has been done in your
artist-metaphysics? —which would rather believe
in Nothing, or in the devil, than in the " Now "?
Does not a radical bass of wrath and annihilative
pleasure growl on beneath all your contrapuntal
vocal art and aural seduction, a mad determination
to oppose all that "now" is, a will which is not
so very far removed from practical nihilism and
which seems to say: "rather let nothing be true,
than that you should be in the right, than that
your truth should prevail! " Hear, yourself, my
dear Sir Pessimist and art-deifier, with ever so
unlocked ears, a single select passage of your
own book, that not ineloquent dragon-slayer
passage, which may sound insidiously rat-charm-
ing to young ears and hearts. What? is not
that the true blue romanticist-confession of 1830
under the mask of the pessimism of 1850? After
which, of course, the usual romanticist finale at once
strikes up,—rupture, collapse, return and prostra-
tion before an old belief, before the old God. . . .
## p. 14 (#54) ##############################################
14 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
What? is not your pessimist book itself a piece
of anti-Hellenism and Romanticism, something
"equally intoxicating and befogging," a narcotic
at all events, ay, a piece of music, of German
music? But listen:
Let us imagine a rising generation with this un-
dauntedness of vision, with this heroic impulse towards
the prodigious, let us imagine the bold step of these
dragon-slayers, the proud daring with which they turn
their backs on all the effeminate doctrines of optimism, in
order "to live resolutely" in the Whole and in the Full:
•would it not be necessary for the tragic man of this
culture, with his self-discipline to earnestness and terror,
to desire a new art, the art of metaphysical comfort,
tragedy as the Helena belonging to him, and that he
should exclaim with Faust:
"Und sollt ich nicht, sehnsiichtigster Gewalt,
In's Leben ziehn die einzigste Gestalt? "*
"Would it not be necessary? " . . . No, thrice
no! ye young romanticists: it would not be
necessary! But it is very probable, that things
may end thus, that ye may end thus, namely
"comforted," as it is written, in spite of all self-
discipline to earnestness and terror; metaphysic-
ally comforted, in short, as Romanticists are wont
to end, as Christians. . . . No! ye should first
of all learn the art of earthly comfort, ye should
learn to laugh, my young friends, if ye are at
all determined to remain pessimists: if so, you
* And shall not I, by mightiest desire,
In living shape that sole fair form acquire?
SWANWICK, trans, of Faust.
## p. 15 (#55) ##############################################
AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. 15
will perhaps, as laughing ones, eventually send all
metaphysical comfortism to the devil—and meta-
physics first of all! Or, to say it in the language
of that Dionysian ogre, called Zarathustra:
"Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher!
And do not forget your legs! Lift up also your legs, ye
good dancers—and better still if ye stand also on your
heads!
"This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown
—I myself have put on this crown; I myself have
consecrated my laughter. No one else have I found
to-day strong enough for this.
"Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light one,
who beckoneth with his pinions, one ready for flight,
beckoning unto all birds, ready and prepared, a bliss-
fully light-spirited one :—
"Zarathustra the soothsayer, Zarathustra the sooth-
laugher, no impatient one, no absolute one, one who
loveth leaps and side-leaps: I myself have put on this
crown!
"This crown of the laughter, this rose. garland crown
—to you my brethren do I cast this crown! Laughing
have I consecrated : ye higher men, learn, I pray you—
to laugh 1"
Thus spake Zarathustra, lxxiii. 17, 18, and 20.
Sils-Maria, Oberbngadin,
August 1886.
## p. 16 (#56) ##############################################
## p. 17 (#57) ##############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY
FROM THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC
## p. 18 (#58) ##############################################
## p. 19 (#59) ##############################################
FOREWORD TO RICHARD
WAGNER.
In order to keep at a distance all the possible
scruples, excitements, and misunderstandings to
which the thoughts gathered in this essay will
give occasion, considering the peculiar character
of our aesthetic publicity, and to be able also to
write the introductory remarks with the same
contemplative delight, the impress of which, as
the petrifaction of good and elevating hours, it
bears on every page, I form a conception of the
moment when you, my highly honoured friend,
will receive this essay; how you, say after an
evening walk in the winter snow, will behold the
unbound Prometheus on the title-page, read my
name, and be forthwith convinced that, whatever
this essay may contain, the author has something
earnest and impressive to say, and, moreover, that
in all his meditations he communed with you as
with one present and could thus write only what
befitted your presence. You will thus remember
that it was at the same time as your magnificent
dissertation on Beethoven originated, viz. , amidst
## p. 20 (#60) ##############################################
20 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
the horrors and sublimities of the war which had
just then broken out, that I collected myself for
these thoughts. But those persons would err, to
whom this collection suggests no more perhaps
than the antithesis of patriotic excitement and
aesthetic revelry, of gallant earnestness and
sportive delight. Upon a real perusal of this
essay, such readers will, rather to their surprise,
discover how earnest is the German problem we
have to deal with, which we properly place, as
a vortex and turning-point, in the very midst of
German hopes. Perhaps, however, this same
class of readers will be shocked at seeing an
aesthetic problem taken so seriously, especially if
they can recognise in art no more than a merry
diversion, a readily dispensable court-jester to the
"earnestness of existence ": as if no one were
aware of the real meaning of this confrontation
with the "earnestness of existence. " These
earnest ones may be informed that I am convinced
that art is the highest task and the properly
metaphysical activity of this life, as it is under-
stood by the man, to whom, as my sublime
protagonist on this path, I would now dedicate
this essay.
Basel, end of the year 1871.
## p.
brother seems to lay particular stress upon the value
of rigorous training, free from all sentimentality, it
should be remembered that he speaks from experi-
ence in this respect. At Pforta he followed the
regular school course, and he did not enter a uni-
versity until the comparatively late age of twenty.
His extraordinary gifts manifested themselves
chiefly in his independent and private studies and
artistic efforts. As a boy his musical talent had
already been so noticeable, that he himself and other
competent judges were doubtful as to whether he
ought not perhaps to devote himself altogether to
music. It is, however, worth noting that everything
he did in his later years, whether in Latin, Greek, or
German work,bore the stamp of perfection—subject
of course to the limitation imposed upon him by his
years. His talents came very suddenly to the fore,
because he had allowed them to grow for such a
long time in concealment. His very first perform-
ance in philology, executed while he was a student
under Ritschl, the famous philologist, was also
typical of him in this respect, seeing that it was
ordered to be printed for the Rheinische Museum.
Of course this was done amid general and grave ex-
pressions of doubt; for, as Dr. Ritschl often declared,
J
## p. xiv (#24) #############################################
XIV INTRODUCTION.
it was an unheard-of occurrence for a student in his
third term to prepare such an excellent treatise.
Being a great lover of out-door exercise, such as
swimming, skating, and walking, he developed into a
very sturdy lad. Rohde gives the following descrip-
tion of him as a student: with his healthy com-
plexion,his outward and innercleanliness,hisaustere
chastity and his solemn aspect, he was the image of
that delightful youth described by Adalbert Stifter.
Though as a child he was always rather serious,
as a lad and a man he was ever inclined to see the
humorous side of things, while his whole being, and
everything he said or did, was permeated by an
extraordinary harmony. He belonged to the very
few who could control even a bad mood and conceal
it from others. All his friends are unanimous in
their praise of his exceptional evenness of temper
and behaviour, and his warm, hearty, and pleasant
laugh that seemed to come from the very depths
of his benevolent and affectionate nature. In him
it might therefore be said, nature had produced a
being who in body and spirit was a harmonious
whole: his unusual intellect was fully in keeping
with his uncommon bodily strength.
The only abnormal thing about him, and some-
thing which we both inherited from our father, was
short-sightedness, and this was very much aggra-
vated in my brother's case, even in his earliest school-
days, owing to that indescribable anxiety to learn
which always characterised him. When one listens
to accounts given by his friends and schoolfellows,
one is startled by the multiplicity of his studies even
in his schooldays.
## p. xv (#25) ##############################################
INTRODUCTION. XV
In the autumn of 1864, he began his university
life in Bonn, and studied philology and theology;
at the end of six months he gave up theology, and
in the autumn of 1865 followed his famous teacher
Ritschl to the University of Leipzig. There he
became an ardent philologist, and diligently sought
to acquire a masterly grasp of this branch of know-
ledge. But in this respect it would be unfair to
forget that the school of Pforta, with its staff of
excellent teachers — scholars that would have
adorned the chairs of any University—had already
afforded the best of preparatory trainings to any one
intending to take up philology as a study, more
particularly as it gave all pupils ample scope to
indulge any individual tastes they might have for
any particular branch of ancient history. The last
important Latin thesis which my brother wrote for
the Landes-Schule, Pforta, dealt with the Megarian
poet Theognis, and it was in the r61e of a lecturer
on this very subject that, on the 18th January
1866, he made his first appearance in public, before
the philological society he had helped to found in
Leipzig. The paper he read disclosed his investiga-
tions on the subject of Theognis the moralist and
aristocrat, who, as is well known, described and dis-
missed the plebeians of his time in terms of the
heartiest contempt. The aristocratic ideal, which
was always so dear to my brother, thus revealed
itself for the first time. Moreover, curiously enough,
it was precisely this scientific thesis which was the
cause of Ritschl's recognition of my brother and
fondness for him.
The whole of his Leipzig days proved of the
b
## p. xvi (#26) #############################################
XVI INTRODUCTION.
utmost importance to my brother's career. There
he was plunged into the very midst of a torrent
of intellectual influences which found an impression-
able medium in the fiery youth, and to which he
eagerly made himself accessible. He did not,
however, forget to discriminate among them, but
tested and criticised the currents of thought he
encountered, and selected accordingly. It is
certainly of great importance to ascertain what
those influences precisely were to which he yielded,
and how long they maintained their sway over him,
and it is likewise necessary to discover exactly
when the matured mind threw off these fetters in
order to work out its own salvation.
The influences that exercised power over him
in those days may be described in the three follow-
ing terms: Hellenism, Schopenhauer,Wagner. His
love of Hellenism certainly led him to philology;
but, as a matter of fact, what concerned him most
was to obtain a wide view of things in general,
and this he hoped to derive from that science;
philology in itself, with his splendid method and
thorough way of going to work, served him only
as a means to an end.
If Hellenism was the first strong influence which
already in Pforta obtained a sway over my brother,
in the winter of 1865-66, a completely new, and
therefore somewhat subversive, influence was intro-
duced into his life with Schopenhauer's philosophy.
When he reached Leipzig in the autumn of 1865,
he was very downcast; for the experiences that
had befallen him during his one year of student
life in Bonn had deeply depressed him. He had
## p. xvii (#27) ############################################
INTRODUCTION. XVII
sought at first to adapt himself to his surround-
ings there, with the hope of ultimately elevating
them to his lofty views on things; but both these
efforts proved vain, and now he had come to
Leipzig with the purpose of framing his own
manner of life. It can easily be imagined how
the first reading of Schopenhauer's The World as
Will and Idea worked upon this man, still sting-
ing from the bitterest experiences and disappoint-
ments. He writes: "Here I saw a mirror in
which I espied the world, life, and my own nature
depicted with frightful grandeur. " As my brother,
from his very earliest childhood, had always missed
both the parent and the educator through our
father's untimely death, he began to regard
Schopenhauer with almost filial love and respect.
He did not venerate him quite as other men did;
Schopenhauer's personality was what attracted and
enchanted him. From the first he was never
blind to the faults in his master's system, and in
proof of this we have only to refer to an essay he
wrote in the autumn of 1867, which actually con-
tains a criticism of Schopenhauer's philosophy.
Now, in the autumn of 1865, to these two
influences, Hellenism and Schopenhauer, a third
influence was added—one which was to prove the
strongest ever exercised over my brother—and it
began with his personal introduction to Richard
Wagner. He was introduced to Wagner by the
latter's sister, Frau Professor Brockhaus, and his
description of their first meeting, contained in a
letter to Erwin Rohde, is really most affecting.
For years, that is to say, from the time Bulow's
## p. xviii (#28) ###########################################
XV111 INTRODUCTION.
arrangement of Tristan and Isolde for thepianoforte,
had appeared, he had already been a passionate
admirer of Wagner's music; but now that the
artist himself entered upon the scene of his life,
with the whole fascinating strength of his strong
will, my brother felt that he was in the presence
of a being whom he, of all modern men, resembled
most in regard to force of character.
Again, in the case of Richard Wagner, my
brother, from the first, laid the utmost stress upon
the man's personality, and could only regard his
works and views as an expression of the artist's
whole being, despite the fact that he by no means
understood every one of those works at that time.
My brother was the first who ever manifested
such enthusiastic affection for Schopenhauer and
Wagner, and he was also the first of that numer-
ous band of young followers who ultimately in-
scribed the two great names upon their banner.
Whether Schopenhauer and Wagner ever really
corresponded to the glorified pictures my brother
painted of them, both in his letters and other
writings, is a question which we can no longer
answer in the affirmative. Perhaps what he saw
in them was only what he himself wished to be
some day.
The amount of work my brother succeeded in
accomplishing, during his student days, really
seems almost incredible. When we examine his
record for the years 1865-67, we can scarcely
believe it refers to only two years' industry, for
at a guess no one would hesitate to suggest four
years at least. But in those days, as he himself
## p. xix (#29) #############################################
INTRODUCTION. XIX
declares, he still possessed the constitution of a
bear. He knew neither what headaches nor in-
digestion meant, and, despite his short sight, his
eyes were able to endure the greatest strain with-
out giving him the smallest trouble. That is why,
regardless of seriously interrupting his studies, he
was so glad at the thought of becoming a soldier
in the forthcoming autumn of 1867; for he was
particularly anxious to discover some means of
employing his bodily strength.
He discharged his duties as a soldier with the
utmost mental and physical freshness, was the
crack rider among the recruits of his year, and
was sincerely sorry when, owing to an accident,
he was compelled to leave the colours before the
completion of his service. As a result of this
accident he had his first dangerous illness.
While mounting his horse one day, the beast,
which was an uncommonly restive one, suddenly
reared, and, causing him to strike his chest sharply
against the pommel of the saddle, threw him to
the ground. My brother then made a second
attempt to mount, and succeeded this time, not-
withstanding the fact that he had severely sprained
and torn two muscles in his chest, and had seri-
ously bruised the adjacent ribs. For a whole day
he did his utmost to pay no heed to the injury,
and to overcome the pain it caused him; but in
the end he only swooned, and a dangerously acute
inflammation of the injured tissues was the result.
Ultimately he was obliged to consult the famous
specialist, Professor Volkmann, in Halle, who
quickly put him right.
## p. xx (#30) ##############################################
XX INTRODUCTION.
In October 1868, my brother returned to his
studies in Leipzig with double joy. These were
his plans: to get his doctor's degree as soon as
possible; to proceed to Paris, Italy, and Greece,
make a lengthy stay in each place, and then
to return to Leipzig in order to settle there as a
privat docent. All these plans were, however,
suddenly frustrated owing to his premature call
to the University of Bale, where he was invited
to assume the duties of professor. Some of the
philological essays he had written in his student
days, and which were published by the Rheinische
Museum, had attracted the attention of the
Educational Board at Bale. Ratsherr Wilhelm
Vischer, as representing this body, appealed to
Ritschl for fuller information. Now Ritschl, who
had early recognised my brother's extraordinary
talents, must have written a letter of such enthusi-
astic praise (" Nietzsche is a genius: he can do
whatever he chooses to put his mind to"), that
one of the more cautious members of the council
is said to have observed: "If the proposed
candidate be really such a genius, then it were
better did we not appoint him; for, in any case,
he would only stay a short time at the little
University of Bile. " My brother ultimately
accepted the appointment, and, in view of his
published philological works, he was immediately
granted the doctor's degree by the University of
Leipzig. He was twenty-four years and six
months old when he took up his position as
professor in Bale,—and it was with a heavy heart
that he proceeded there, for he knew "the golden
## p. xxi (#31) #############################################
INTRODUCTION. XXI
period of untrammelled activity " must cease. He
was, however, inspired by the deep wish of being
able "to transfer to his pupils some of that
Schopenhauerian earnestness which is stamped
on the brow of the sublime man. " "I should like
to be something more than a mere trainer of
capable philologists: the present generation of
teachers, the care of the growing broods,—all this
is in my mind. If we must live, let us at least
do so in such wise that others may bless our life
once we have been peacefully delivered from its
toils. "
When I look back upon that month of May
1869, and ask both of friends and of myself, what
the figure of this youthful University professor of
four-and-twenty meant to the world at that time,
the reply is naturally, in the first place: that he
was one of Ritschl's best pupils ; secondly, that he
was an exceptionally capable exponent of classical
antiquity with a brilliant career before him; and
thirdly, that he was a passionate adorer of Wagner
and Schopenhauer. But no one has any idea of
my brother's independent attitude to the science
he had selected, to his teachers and to his ideals,
and he deceived both himself and us when he
passed as a " disciple" who really shared all the
views of his respected master.
On the 28th May 1869, my brother delivered
his inaugural address at Bale University, and it is
said to have deeply impressed the authorities.
The subject of the address was "Homer and
Classical Philology. "
Musing deeply, the worthy councillors and
## p. xxii (#32) ############################################
xxu
INTRODUCTION.
professors walked homeward. What had they
just heard? A young scholar discussing the very
justification of his own science in a cool and
philosophically critical spirit! A man able to
impart so much artistic glamour to his subject,
that the once stale and arid study of philology
suddenly struck them—and they were certainly
not impressionable men—as the messenger of the
gods: "and just as the Muses descended upon the
dull and tormented Boeotian peasants, so phil-
ology comes into a world full of gloomy colours and
pictures, full of the deepest, most incurable woes,
and speaks to men comfortingly of the beautiful
and brilliant godlike figure of a distant, blue, and
happy fairyland. "
"We have indeed got hold of a rare bird,
Herr Ratsherr," said one of these gentlemen to
his companion, and the latter heartily agreed, for
my brother's appointment had been chiefly his
doing.
Even in Leipzig, it was reported that Jacob
Burckhardt had said: "Nietzsche is as much an
artist as a scholar. " Privy-Councillor Ritschl
told me of this himself, and then he added, with
a smile: "I always said so; he can make his
scientific discourses as palpitatingly interesting as
a French novelist his novels. "
"Homer and Classical Philology" — my
brother's inaugural address at the University—
was by no means the first literary attempt
he had made; for we have already seen that
he had had papers published by the Rheinische
Museum; still, this particular discourse is import-
## p. xxiii (#33) ###########################################
INTRODUCTION. XXlii
ant, seeing that it practically contains the pro-
gramme of many other subsequent essays. I
must, however, emphasise this fact here, that
neither "Homer and Classical Philology," nor
The Birth of Tragedy^ represents a beginning
in my brother's career. It is really surprising to
see how very soon he actually began grappling
with the questions which were to prove the
problems of his life. If a beginning to his
intellectual development be sought at all, then
it must be traced to the years 1865-67 in
Leipzig. The Birth of Tragedy, his maiden
attempt at book-writing, with which he began his
twenty-eighth year, is the last link of a long
chain of developments, and the first fruit that was
a long time coming to maturity. Nietzsche's
was a polyphonic nature, in which the most
different and apparently most antagonistic tal-
ents had come together. Philosophy, art, and
science—in the form of philology, then—each
certainly possessed a part of him. The most
wonderful feature — perhaps it might even be
called the real Nietzschean feature — of this
versatile creature, was the fact that no eternal
strife resulted from the juxtaposition of these
inimicial traits, that not one of them strove to
dislodge, or to get the upper hand of, the others.
When Nietzsche renounced the musical career, in
order to devote himself to philology, and gave
himself up to the most strenuous study, he did
not find it essential completely to suppress his
other tendencies: as before, he continued both to
compose and derive pleasure from music, and
## p. xxiv (#34) ############################################
XXIV INTRODUCTION.
even studied counterpoint somewhat seriously.
Moreover, during his years at Leipzig, when he
consciously gave himself up to philological re-
search, he began to engross himself in Schopen-
hauer, and was thereby won by philosophy for
ever. Everything that could find room took up
its abode in him, and these juxtaposed factors,
far from interfering with one another's existence,
were rather mutually fertilising and stimulating.
All those who have read the first volume of the
biography with attention must have been struck
with the perfect way in which the various impulses
in his nature combined in the end to form one
general torrent, and how this flowed with ever
greater force in the direction of a single goal.
I^. --. Thus science, art, and philosophy developed and
became ever more closely related in him, until,
in The Birth of Tragedy, they brought forth a
"centaur," that is to say, a work which would
have been an impossible achievement to a man
with only a single, special talent. This polyphony
of different talents, all coming to utterance
together and producing the richest and boldest
of harmonies, is the fundamental feature not only
of Nietzsche's early days, but of his whole
development. It is once again the artist,
philosopher, and man of science, who as one
man in later years, after many wanderings, re-
cantations, and revulsions of feeling, produces
that other and rarer Centaur of highest rank—
Zarathustra.
The Birth of Tragedy requires perhaps a little
explaining—more particularly as we have now
## p. xxv (#35) #############################################
INTRODUCTION. XXV
ceased to use either Schopenhauerian or Wagnerian
terms of expression. And it was for this reason
that five years after its appearance, my brother
wrote an introduction to it, in which he very
plainly expresses his doubts concerning the views
it contains, and the manner in which they are
presented. The kernel of its thought he always
recognised as perfectly correct; and all he de-
plored in later days was that he had spoiled the
grand problem of Hellenism, as he understood it,
by adulterating it with ingredients taken from the
world of most modern ideas. As time went on, he
grew ever more and more anxious to define the
deep meaning of this book with greater precision
and clearness. A very good elucidation of its
aims, which unfortunately was never published,
appears among his notes of the year 1886, and
is as follows:—
"Concerning The Birtk of Tragedy. —A book
consisting of mere experiences relating to pleasur-
able and unpleasurable aesthetic states, with a
metaphysico-artistic background. At the same
time the confession of a romanticist {the sufferer
feels the deepest longing for beauty—he begets it);
finally, a product of youth, full of youthful courage
and melancholy. , .
"Fundamental psychological experiences: the 1
word 'Apollonian' stands for that state of rapt
repose in the presefice ot a visionary world, in the
presence of the world of beautiful appearance
"designed as a deliverance from becoming: the_
word DiohysosT on the other hand, stands for
strenuous becoming, grown self-conscious, in the
## p. xxvi (#36) ############################################
xxvi
INTRODUCTION.
form of the rampant voluptuousness of the creator,
who is also perfectly conscious of the violent anger
of the destroyer.
"The antagonism of these two attitudes and
the desires that underlie them. The first-named
would have the vision it conjures up eternal : in
its light man must be quiescent, apathetic, peace-
ful, healed, and on friendly terms with himself and
all existence; the second strives after creation,
after the voluptuousness of wilful creation, il.
constructing and destroying. Creation felt and
explained as an instinct would be merely the
a nini unremitting inventive action of a dissatisfied
donec being, overflowing with wealth and living at high
tension and high pressure,—of a God who would
overcome the sorrows of existence by means_
only of continual changes and transformations,
iete
appearance as a transient and momentary deliver-
ance; the world as an apparent sequence of
godlike visions and deliverances.
“This metaphysico-artistic attitude is opposed
to Schopenhauer's one-sided view, which values
art, not from the artist's standpoint but from the
spectator's, because it brings salvation and deliver-
ance by means of the joy produced by unreal as
opposed to the existing or the real (the experi-
ence only of him who is suffering and is in
despair owing to himself and everything existing).
-Deliverance in the form and its eternity (just as
Plato may have pictured it, save that he rejoiced
in a complete subordination of all too excitable
sensibilities, even in the idea itself). To this is
opposed the second point of view-art regarded
## p. xxvii (#37) ###########################################
INTRODUCTION.
xxvii
as a phenomenon of the artist, above all of the
musician: the torture of being obliged to create,
as a Dionysian instinct.
“Tragic art, rich in both attitudes, represents
the reconciliation of. Apollo and Dionysos.
Appearance is given the greatest importance by
Dionysos; and yet it will be denied and cheerfully.
denied. This is directed against Schopenhauer's
teaching of Resignation as the tragic attitude
towards the world.
“ Against Wagner's theory that music is a
means and drama an end.
“A desire for tragic myth (for religion and even
pessimistic religion) as for a forcing frame in
which certain plants flourish.
"Mistrust of science, although its ephemerally
soothing optimism be strongly felt; the serenity'
of the theoretical man.
“ Deep antagonism to Christianity. Why?
The degeneration of the Germanic spirit is ascribed
to its influence.
“ Any justification of the world can only be
an æsthetic one. Profound suspicions about
morality ( it is part and parcel of the world of
appearance).
"The happiness of existence is only possible as
the happiness derived from appearance. (Being
is a fiction invented by those who suffer from
becoming. )
"Happiness in becoming is possible only in
the annihilation of the real, of the existing,
of the beautifully visionary,-in the pessimistic
dissipation of illusions :—with the annihilation
hotia
## p. xxviii (#38) ##########################################
XXVlil INTRODUCTION.
of the most beautiful phenomena in the world
of,. appearance, Dionysian happiness reaches it?
. zenith. """ *! '
'l he Utrth of Tragedy is really only a portion
of a much greater work on Hellenism, which my
brother had always had in view from the time
of his student days. But even the portion it
represents was originally designed upon a much
larger scale than the present one; the reason
probably being, that Nietzsche desired only to be
of service to Wagner. When a certain portion
of the projected work on Hellenism was ready
and had received the title Greek Cheerfulness,
my brother happened to call upon Wagner at
Tribschen in April 1871, and found him very
low-spirited in regard to the mission of his life.
My brother was very anxious to take some decis-
ive step to help him, and, laying the plans of his
great work on Greece aside, he selected a small
portion from the already completed manuscript
—a portion dealing with one distinct side of
Hellenism,—to wit, its tragic art. He then
associated Wagner's music with it and the name
Dionysos, and thus took the first step towards
that world-historical view through which we have
since grown accustomed to regard Wagner.
From the dates of the various notes relating
to it, The Birth of Tragedy must have been written
between the autumn of 1869 and November
1871—a period during which " a mass of aesthetic
questions and answers" was fermenting in
Nietzsche's mind. It was first published in
January 1872 by E. W. Fritsch, in Leipzig,
## p. xxix (#39) ############################################
INTRODUCTION.
xxix
under the title The Birth of Tragedy out of
the Spirit of Music. Later on the title was
changed to The Birth of Tragedy, or Hellenism
and Pessimism.
ELIZABETH FÖRSTER-NIETZSCHE.
WEIMAR, September 1905.
## p. xxx (#40) #############################################
1
## p. 1 (#41) ###############################################
AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-
CRITICISM.
i.
Whatever may lie at the bottom of this doubt-
ful book must be a questionpof the first rank
and attractiveness, moreover a deeply personal
question,—in proof thereof observe the time
in which it originated, in spite of which it origin-
ated, the exciting period of the Franco-German
war of 1870-71. While the thunder of the
battle of Worth rolled over Europe, the ruminator
and riddle-lover, who had to be the parent of this
book, sat somewhere in a nook of the Alps, lost in
riddles and ruminations, consequently very much
concerned and unconcerned at the same time, and
wrote down his meditations on the Greeks,—the
kernel of the curious and almost inaccessible book,
to which this belated prologue (or epilogue) is to
be devoted. A few weeks later: and he found
himself under the walls of Metz, still wrestling
with the notes of interrogation he had set down
concerning the alleged " cheerfulness " of the Greeks
and of Greek art; till at last, in that month of
A
## p. 2 (#42) ###############################################
2 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
'•,
deep suspense, when peace was debated at Ver-
sailles, he too attained to peace with himself, and,
slowly recovering from a disease brought home
from the field, made up his mind definitely re-
garding the "Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of
Music! '—From music? Music and Tragedy?
Greeks and tragic music? Greeks and the Art-
work of pessimism? A race of men, well-fashioned,
beautiful, envied, life-inspiring, like no other race
hitherto, the Greeks—indeed? The Greeks were
in need of tragedy? Yea—of art? Wherefore—
. \ Greek art? . . .
,('. *fci We can thus guess where the great note of
interrogation concerning the value of existence
had been set. Is pessimism necessarily the sign
of decline, of decay, of failure, of exhausted and
weakened instincts? —as was the case with the
Indians, as is, to all appearance, the case with us
"modern" men and Europeans?
Is there a pessi-
mism of strength? An intellectual predilection for
what is hard, awful, evil, problematical in exist-
ence, owing to well-being, to exuberant health, to
fullness of existence? Is there perhaps suffering
in overfullness itself? A seductive fortitude with
the keenest of glances, which yearns for the
terrible, as for the enemy, the worthy enemy, with
whom it may try its strength? from whom it is
willing to learn what "fear" is? What means
tragic myth to the Greeks of the best, strongest,
bravest era? And the prodigious phenomenon of
the Dionysian? And that which was born there-
of, tragedy ? —And again: that of which tragedy
died, the Socratism of morality, the dialectics,
## p. 3 (#43) ###############################################
AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. 3
contentedness and cheerfulness of the theoretical
man—indeed? might not this very Socratism be
a sign of decline, of weariness, of disease, of
anarchically disintegrating instincts? And the
"Hellenic cheerfulness" of the later Hellenism
merely a glowing sunset? The Epicurean will
counter to pessimism merely a precaution of the
sufferer? And science itself, our science—ay,
viewed as a symptom of life, what really signifies
all science? Whither, worse still, whence—all
science? Well? Is scientism perhaps only fear
and evasion of pessimism? A subtle defence
against—truth} Morally speaking, something
like falsehood and cowardice? And, unmorally
speaking, an artifice? O Socrates, Socrates, was
this perhaps thy secret? Oh mysterious ironist,
was this perhaps thine—irony? . . .
2.
What I then laid hands on, something terrible
and dangerous, a problem with horns, not neces-
sarily a bull itself, but at all events a new problem:
I should say to-day it was the problem of science
itself—science conceived for the first time as prob-
lematic, as questionable. But the book, in which
my youthful ardour and suspicion then discharged
themselves—what an impossible book must needs
grow out of a task so disagreeable to youth. Con-
structed of nought but precocious, unripened self-
experiences, all of which lay close to the threshold
of the communicable, based on the groundwork of
## p. 4 (#44) ###############################################
4 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
art—for the problem of science cannot be discerned
on the groundwork of science,—a book perhaps for
artists, with collateral analytical and retrospective
aptitudes (that is, an exceptional kind of artists,
for whom one must seek and does not even care
to seek . . . ), full of psychological innovations and
artists' secrets, with an artists' metaphysics in the
background, a work of youth, full of youth's mettle
and youth's melancholy, independent, defiantly
self-sufficient even when it seems to bow to some
authority and self-veneration; in short, a firstling-
work, even in every bad sense of the term; in
spite of its senile problem, affected with every
fault of youth, above all with youth's pro-
lixity and youth's "storm and stress": on the
other hand, in view of the success it had (especi-
ally with the great artist to whom it addressed
itself, as it were, in a duologue, Richard Wagner)
a demonstrated book, I mean a book which, at any
rate, sufficed "for the best of its time. " On this
account, if for no other reason, it should be treated
with some consideration and reserve; yet I shall
not altogether conceal how disagreeable it now
appears to me, how after sixteen years it stands a
total stranger before me,—before an eye which is
more mature, and a hundred times more fastidious,
but which has by no means grown colder nor lost
any of its interest in that self-same task essayed
for the first time by this daring book,—to view
science through the optics of the artist, and art more-
over through the optics of life. , , .
## p. 5 (#45) ###############################################
AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM.
I say again, to-day it is an impossible book to
me,—I call it badly written, heavy, painful, image-
angling and image-entangling, maudlin, sugared
at times even to femininism, uneven in tempo,
void of the will to logical cleanliness, very con-
vinced and therefore rising above the necessity of
demonstration, distrustful even of the propriety of
demonstration, as being a book for initiates, as
"music" for those who are baptised with the
name of Music, who are united from the beginning
of things by common ties of rare experiences in
art, as a countersign for blood-relations in artibus,
—a haughty and fantastic book, which from the
very first withdraws even more from the pro-
fanum valgus of the "cultured" than from the
"people," but which also, as its effect has shown
and still shows, knows very well how to seek
fellow-enthusiasts and lure them to new by-ways
and dancing-grounds. Here, at any rate—thus
much was acknowledged with curiosity as well
as with aversion—a strange voice spoke, the
disciple of a still "unknown God," who for the
time being had hidden himself under the hood
of the scholar, under the German's gravity and
disinclination for dialectics, even under the bad
manners of the Wagnerian; here was a spirit
with strange and still nameless needs, a memory
bristling with questions, experiences and obscur-
ities, beside which stood the name Dionysos like
one more note of interrogation; here spoke—
people said to themselves with misgivings—some-
## p. 6 (#46) ###############################################
6 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
,,' -
:•,
thing like a mystic and almost maenadic soul,
which, undecided whether it should disclose or
conceal itself, stammers with an effort and caprici-
ously as in a strange tongue. It should have
sung, this "new soul"—and not spoken! What
a pity, that I did not dare to say what I then had
to say, as a poet: I could have done so perhaps!
Or at least as a philologist:—for even at the
present day well-nigh everything in this domain
remains to be discovered and disinterred by the
philologist! Above all the problem, that here
there is a problem before us,—and that, so long
as we have no answer to the question " what is
Dionysian? " the Greeks are now as ever wholly
unknown and inconceivable . . .
Ay, what is Dionysian ? —In this book may be
found an answer,—a " knowing one" speaks here,
the votary and disciple of his god. Perhaps I
should now speak more guardedly and less elo-
quently of a psychological question so difficult as
,<•>*! the origin of tragedy among the Greeks. A
__furidamental question is the relation of the Greek
to pain, his degree qf sensibility,—did this relation
. remain constant? or did it veer about ? —the ques-
tion, whether his ever-increasing longing. for beauty,
for festivals, gaieties, new cults, did really grow
out of want, privation, melancholy, pain? For
suppose even this to be true—and Pericles (or
Thucydides) intimates as much in the great
Funeral Speech:—whence then the opposite
## p. 7 (#47) ###############################################
AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM.
i
longing, which appeared first in the order of time,
the longing for the ugly, the good, resolute desire
of the Old Hellene for pessimism, for tragic myth,
for the picture of all that is terrible, evil, enig-
matical, destructive, fatal at the basis of existence,
-whence then must tragedy have sprung? Per-
haps from joy, from strength, from exuberant health,
from over-fullness. And what then, physiologic-
ally speaking, is the meaning of that madness,
out of which comic as well as tragic art has
grown, the Dionysian madness? What? perhaps
madness is not necessarily the symptom of
degeneration, of decline, of belated culture ?
Perhaps there are—a question for alienists—
neuroses of health? of folk-youth and -youthful-
ness? What does that synthesis of god and goat
in the Satyr point to? What self-experience
what "stress," made the Greek think of the
Dionysian reveller and primitive man as a satyr?
And as regards the origin of the tragic chorus:
perhaps there were endemic ecstasies in the eras
when the Greek body bloomed and the Greek
soul brimmed over with life? Visions and hallu-
cinations, which took hold of entire communities,
entire cult-assemblies ? What if the Greeks in the
very wealth of their youth had the will to be tragic
and were pessimists? What if it was madness
itself, to use a word of Plato's, which brought the
greatest blessings upon Hellas? And what if,
on the other hand and conversely, at the very
time of their dissolution and weakness, the Greeks
became always more optimistic, more superficial,
more histrionic, also more ardent for logic and the
## p. 8 (#48) ###############################################
8 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
logicising of the world,—consequently at the same
time more "cheerful" and more "scientific"?
Ay, despite all "modern ideas" and prejudices
of the democratic taste, may not the triumph of
optimism, the common sense that has gained the
upper hand, the practical and theoretical utilitar-
ianism, like democracy itself, with which it is
synchronous—be symptomatic of declining vigour,
of approaching age, of physiological weariness?
/And not at all—pessimism? Was Epicurus an
( optimist—because a sufferer? . . . We see it is a
whole bundle of weighty questions which this book
has taken upon itself,—let us not fail to add its
weightiest question! Viewed through the optics
/ of life, what is the meaning of—morality? . . .
5.
Already in the foreword to Richard Wagner,
art—and not morality—is set down as the properly
metaphysical activity of man; in the book itself
the piquant proposition recurs time and again,
that the existence of the world is justified only as
an aesthetic phenomenon. Indeed, the entire book
recognises only an artist-thought and artist-after-
thought behind all occurrences,—a "God," if you
will, but certainly only an altogether thoughtless
and unmoral artist-God, who, in construction as
in destruction, in good as in evil, desires to
become conscious of his own equable joy and
sovereign glory; who, in creating worlds, frees
himself from the anguish of fullness and overfull-
ness, from the suffering of the contradictions con-
## p. 9 (#49) ###############################################
AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. 9
centrated within him. The world, that is, the
redemption of God attained at every moment, as
the perpetually changing, perpetually new vision
of the most suffering, most antithetical, most
contradictory being, who contrives to redeem him-
self only in appearance: this entire artist-meta-
physics, call it arbitrary, idle, fantastic, if you
will,—the point is, that it already betrays a spirit,
which is determined some day, at all hazards, to
make a stand against the moral interpretation
and significance of life. Here, perhaps for the
first time, a pessimism "Beyond Good and Evil"
announces itself, here that "perverseness of dis-
position" obtains expression and formulation,
against which Schopenhauer never grew tired of
hurling beforehand his angriest imprecations and
thunderbolts,—a philosophy which dares to put,
derogatorily put, morality itself in the world of
phenomena, and not only among "phenomena"
(in the sense of the idealistic terminus technicus),
but among the "illusions," as appearance, sem-
blance, error, interpretation, accommodation, art.
Perhaps the depth of this antimoral tendency may
be best estimated from the guarded and hostile'!
silence with which Christianity is treated through-
out this book,—Christianity, as being the most
extravagant burlesque of the moral theme to which
mankind has hitherto been obliged to listen. In
fact, to the purely aesthetic world-interpretation
and justification taught in this book, there is no
greater antithesis than the Christian dogma, which
is only and will be only moral, and which, with
its absolute standards, for instance, its truthfulness
## p. 10 (#50) ##############################################
IO THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
of God, relegates — that is, disowns, convicts,
condemns—art, all art, to the realm of falsehood.
Behind such a mode of thought and valuation,
which, if at all genuine, must be hostile to art,
I always experienced what was hostile to life, the
wrathful, vindictive counterwill to life itself: for
all life rests on appearance, art, illusion, optics,
necessity of perspective and error. From the very
first Christianity was, essentially and thoroughly,
the nausea and surfeit of Life for Life, which only
disguised, concealed and decked itself out under
the belief in "another" or "better" life. The
(hatred of the "world," the curse on the affections,
;the fear of beauty and sensuality, another world,
1'invented for the purpose of slandering this world
the more, at bottom a longing for Nothingness,
for the end, for rest, for the " Sabbath of Sabbaths"
—all this, as also the unconditional will of
Christianity to recognise only moral values, has
always appeared to me as the most dangerous
and ominous of all possible forms of a "will to
perish"; at the least, as the symptom of a most
fatal disease,of profoundest weariness, despondency,
>. exhaustion, impoverishment of life,—for before
the tribunal of morality (especially Christian, that
is, unconditional morality) life must constantly
and inevitably be the loser, because life is some-
thing essentially unmoral, — indeed, oppressed
iwith the weight of contempt and the everlasting
No, life must finally be regarded as unworthy of
desire, as in itself unworthy. Morality itself
what? —may not morality be a "will to disown
1 life," a secret instinct for annihilation, a principle
## p. 11 (#51) ##############################################
AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. II
of decay, of depreciation, of slander, a beginning
of the end? And, consequently, the danger of
dangers? . . . It was against morality, therefore,
that my instinct, as an intercessory instinct for
life, turned in this questionable book, inventing
for itself a fundamental counter - dogma and \
counter-valuation of life, purely artistic, purely \
anti-Christian. What should I call it? As a
philologist and man of words I baptised it, not
without some liberty—for who could be sure of the I
proper name of the Antichrist ? —with the name of /
a Greek god: I called it Dionysian. /
6.
You see which problem I ventured to touch upon
in this early work? . . . How I now regret, that I
had not then the courage (or immodesty ? ) to allow
myself, in all respects, the use of an individual
language for such individual contemplations and
ventures in the field of thought—that I laboured to
express, in Kantian and Schopenhauerian formulae,
strange and new valuations, which ran fundament-
ally counter to the spirit of Kant and Schopen-
hauer, as well as to their taste! What, forsooth,
were Schopenhauer's views on tragedy ? " What
gives". —he says in Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,
II. 495—"to all tragedy that singular swing
towards elevation, is the awakening of the know-
ledge that the world, that life, cannot satisfy
us thoroughly, and consequently is not worthy of
our attachment. In this consists the tragic spirit:
it therefore leads to resignation. " Oh, how
>i'
## p. 12 (#52) ##############################################
12 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
differently Dionysos spoke to me! Oh how fai
from me then was just this entire resignationism!
—But there is something far worse in this book,
which I now regret even more than having
obscured and spoiled Dionysian anticipations with
Schopenhauerian formulae: to wit, that, in general,
I spoiled the grand Hellenic problem, as it had
opened up before me, by the admixture of the
most modern things! That I entertained hopes,
where nothing was to be hoped for, where every-
thing pointed all-too-clearly to an approaching
end! That, on the basis of our latter-day
German music, I began to fable about the
"spirit of Teutonism," as if it were on the point
of discovering and returning to itself,—ay, at the
very time that the German spirit which not so
very long before had had the will to the lordship
over Europe, the strength to lead and govern
Europe, testamentarily and conclusively resigned
and, under the pompous pretence of empire-found-
ing, effected its transition to mediocritisation,
democracy, and "modern ideas. " In very fact,
I have since learned to regard this "spirit
of Teutonism" as something to be despaired
of and unsparingly treated, as also our present
German music, which is Romanticism through and
through and the most un-Grecian of all possible
forms of art: and moreover a first-rate nerve-
destroyer, doubly dangerous for a people given
to drinking and revering the unclear as a virtue,
namely, in its two-fold capacity of an intoxi-
cating and stupefying narcotic. Of course, apart
from all precipitate hopes and faulty applications
## p. 13 (#53) ##############################################
AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. 13
to matters specially modern, with which I then
spoiled my first book, the great Diortysian note
of interrogation, as set down therein, continues
standing on and on, even with reference to music:
how must we conceive of a music, which is no longer
of Romantic origin, like the German; but of
Dionysian? . . .
7.
—But, my dear Sir, if your book is not Roman-
ticism, what in the world is? Can the deep hatred
of the present, of " reality" and " modern ideas"
be pushed farther than has been done in your
artist-metaphysics? —which would rather believe
in Nothing, or in the devil, than in the " Now "?
Does not a radical bass of wrath and annihilative
pleasure growl on beneath all your contrapuntal
vocal art and aural seduction, a mad determination
to oppose all that "now" is, a will which is not
so very far removed from practical nihilism and
which seems to say: "rather let nothing be true,
than that you should be in the right, than that
your truth should prevail! " Hear, yourself, my
dear Sir Pessimist and art-deifier, with ever so
unlocked ears, a single select passage of your
own book, that not ineloquent dragon-slayer
passage, which may sound insidiously rat-charm-
ing to young ears and hearts. What? is not
that the true blue romanticist-confession of 1830
under the mask of the pessimism of 1850? After
which, of course, the usual romanticist finale at once
strikes up,—rupture, collapse, return and prostra-
tion before an old belief, before the old God. . . .
## p. 14 (#54) ##############################################
14 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
What? is not your pessimist book itself a piece
of anti-Hellenism and Romanticism, something
"equally intoxicating and befogging," a narcotic
at all events, ay, a piece of music, of German
music? But listen:
Let us imagine a rising generation with this un-
dauntedness of vision, with this heroic impulse towards
the prodigious, let us imagine the bold step of these
dragon-slayers, the proud daring with which they turn
their backs on all the effeminate doctrines of optimism, in
order "to live resolutely" in the Whole and in the Full:
•would it not be necessary for the tragic man of this
culture, with his self-discipline to earnestness and terror,
to desire a new art, the art of metaphysical comfort,
tragedy as the Helena belonging to him, and that he
should exclaim with Faust:
"Und sollt ich nicht, sehnsiichtigster Gewalt,
In's Leben ziehn die einzigste Gestalt? "*
"Would it not be necessary? " . . . No, thrice
no! ye young romanticists: it would not be
necessary! But it is very probable, that things
may end thus, that ye may end thus, namely
"comforted," as it is written, in spite of all self-
discipline to earnestness and terror; metaphysic-
ally comforted, in short, as Romanticists are wont
to end, as Christians. . . . No! ye should first
of all learn the art of earthly comfort, ye should
learn to laugh, my young friends, if ye are at
all determined to remain pessimists: if so, you
* And shall not I, by mightiest desire,
In living shape that sole fair form acquire?
SWANWICK, trans, of Faust.
## p. 15 (#55) ##############################################
AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. 15
will perhaps, as laughing ones, eventually send all
metaphysical comfortism to the devil—and meta-
physics first of all! Or, to say it in the language
of that Dionysian ogre, called Zarathustra:
"Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher!
And do not forget your legs! Lift up also your legs, ye
good dancers—and better still if ye stand also on your
heads!
"This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown
—I myself have put on this crown; I myself have
consecrated my laughter. No one else have I found
to-day strong enough for this.
"Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light one,
who beckoneth with his pinions, one ready for flight,
beckoning unto all birds, ready and prepared, a bliss-
fully light-spirited one :—
"Zarathustra the soothsayer, Zarathustra the sooth-
laugher, no impatient one, no absolute one, one who
loveth leaps and side-leaps: I myself have put on this
crown!
"This crown of the laughter, this rose. garland crown
—to you my brethren do I cast this crown! Laughing
have I consecrated : ye higher men, learn, I pray you—
to laugh 1"
Thus spake Zarathustra, lxxiii. 17, 18, and 20.
Sils-Maria, Oberbngadin,
August 1886.
## p. 16 (#56) ##############################################
## p. 17 (#57) ##############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY
FROM THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC
## p. 18 (#58) ##############################################
## p. 19 (#59) ##############################################
FOREWORD TO RICHARD
WAGNER.
In order to keep at a distance all the possible
scruples, excitements, and misunderstandings to
which the thoughts gathered in this essay will
give occasion, considering the peculiar character
of our aesthetic publicity, and to be able also to
write the introductory remarks with the same
contemplative delight, the impress of which, as
the petrifaction of good and elevating hours, it
bears on every page, I form a conception of the
moment when you, my highly honoured friend,
will receive this essay; how you, say after an
evening walk in the winter snow, will behold the
unbound Prometheus on the title-page, read my
name, and be forthwith convinced that, whatever
this essay may contain, the author has something
earnest and impressive to say, and, moreover, that
in all his meditations he communed with you as
with one present and could thus write only what
befitted your presence. You will thus remember
that it was at the same time as your magnificent
dissertation on Beethoven originated, viz. , amidst
## p. 20 (#60) ##############################################
20 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
the horrors and sublimities of the war which had
just then broken out, that I collected myself for
these thoughts. But those persons would err, to
whom this collection suggests no more perhaps
than the antithesis of patriotic excitement and
aesthetic revelry, of gallant earnestness and
sportive delight. Upon a real perusal of this
essay, such readers will, rather to their surprise,
discover how earnest is the German problem we
have to deal with, which we properly place, as
a vortex and turning-point, in the very midst of
German hopes. Perhaps, however, this same
class of readers will be shocked at seeing an
aesthetic problem taken so seriously, especially if
they can recognise in art no more than a merry
diversion, a readily dispensable court-jester to the
"earnestness of existence ": as if no one were
aware of the real meaning of this confrontation
with the "earnestness of existence. " These
earnest ones may be informed that I am convinced
that art is the highest task and the properly
metaphysical activity of this life, as it is under-
stood by the man, to whom, as my sublime
protagonist on this path, I would now dedicate
this essay.
Basel, end of the year 1871.
## p.
