) 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!
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!
Nietzsche - v01 - Birth of Tragedy
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. 21 (#61) ##############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
We shall have gained much for the science of
æsthetics, when once we have perceived not only
by logical inference, but by the immediate certainty
of intuition, that the continuous development of
art is bound up with the duplexity of the Apollonian
and the Dionysian: in like manner as procreation
is dependent on the duality of the sexes, involving
perpetual conflicts with only periodically inter-
vening reconciliations. These names we borrow
from the Greeks, who disclose to the intelligent
observer the profound mysteries of their view of
art, not indeed in concepts, but in the impressively
clear figures of their world of deities. It is in
connection with Apollo and Dionysus, the two art-
deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there
existed in the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in
origin and aims, between the art of the shaper, the
Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of music, that of
Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies
run parallel to each other, for the most part openly
at variance, and continually inciting each other to
new and more powerful births, to perpetuate in
## p. 22 (#62) ##############################################
22 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
them the strife of this antithesis, which is but
seemingly bridged over by their mutual term
"Art"; till at last, by a metaphysical miracle of
the Hellenic will, they appear paired with each
other, and through this pairing eventually generate
the equally Dionysian and Apollonian art-work
of Attic tragedy.
In order to bring these two tendencies within
closer range, let us conceive them first of all as the
\s f i separate art-worlds of dreamland and drunkenness;
between which physiological phenomena a con-
trast may be observed analogous to that existing
between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. In
dreams, according to the conception of Lucretius,
the glorious divine figures first appeared to the
souls of men, in dreams the great shaper beheld the
charming corporeal structure of superhuman beings,
and the Hellenic poet, if consulted on the mysteries
of poetic inspiration, would likewise have suggested
dreams and would haveofferedan explanation resem-
bling that of Hans Sachs in the Meistersingers :—
Mein Freund, das grad' ist Dichters Werk,
dass er sein Traumen deut' und merk'.
Glaubt mir, des Menschen wahrster VVahn
wird ihm im Traume aufgethan:
all' Dichtkunst und Poeterei
ist nichts als Wahrtraum-Deuterei. *
* My friend, just this is poet's task:
His dreams to read and to unmask.
Trust me, illusion's truths thrice sealed
In dream to man will be revealed.
All verse-craft and poetisation
Is but soothdream interpretation.
~
## p. 23 (#63) ##############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
23
The beauteous appearance of the dream-worlds, 2
in the production of which every man is a perfect
artist, is the presupposition of all plastic art, and
in fact, as we shall see, of an important half of 2
poetry also. We take delight in the immediate
apprehension of form; all forms speak to us; there
is nothing indifferent, nothing superfluous. But,
together with the highest life of this dream-reality
we also have, glimmering through it, the sensation
of its appearance: such at least is my experience,
as to the frequency, ay, normality of which I
could adduce many proofs, as also the sayings of
the poets. Indeed, the man of philosophic turn
has a foreboding that underneath this reality in
which we live and have our being, another and
altogether different reality lies concealed, and that
therefore it is also an appearance; and Schopen-
hauer actually designates the gift of occasionally
regarding men and things as mere phantoms and
dream-pictures as the criterion of philosophical
ability. Accordingly, the man susceptible to art
stands in the same relation to the reality of dreams
as the philosopher to the reality of existence; he
is a close and willing observer, for from these
pictures he reads the meaning of life, and by these
processes he trains himself for life. And it is
perhaps not only the agreeable and friendly
pictures that he realises in himself with such
perfect understanding: the earnest, the troubled,
the dreary, the gloomy, the sudden checks, the
tricks of fortune, the uneasy presentiments, in
short, the whole “ Divine Comedy" of life, and
the Inferno, also pass before him, not merely like
## p. 24 (#64) ##############################################
24
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
pictures on the wall—for he too lives and suffers
in these scenes,—and yet not without that fleeting
sensation of appearance. And perhaps many a
one will, like myself, recollect having sometimes
called out cheeringly and not without success
amid the dangers and terrors of dream-life: “It
is a dream! I will dream on! ” I have likewise
been told of persons capable of continuing the
causality of one and the same dream for three and
even more successive nights : all of which facts
clearly testify that our innermost being, the
common substratum of all of us, experiences our
dreams with deep joy and cheerful acquiescence.
This cheerful acquiescence in the dream-
experience has likewise been embodied by the
Greeks in their Apollo: for Apollo, as the god of
all shaping energies, is also the soothsaying god.
He, who (as the etymology of the name indicates)
is the “shining one,” the deity of light, also rules
over the fair appearance of the inner world of
fantasies. The higher truth, the perfection of
these states in contrast to the only partially
intelligible everyday world, ay, the deep con-
sciousness of nature, healing and helping in sleep
and dream, is at the same time the symbolical
analogue of the faculty of soothsaying and, in
general, of the arts, through which life is made
possible and worth living. But also that delicate
line, which the dream-picture must not overstep
-lest it act pathologically in which case appear-
ance, being reality pure and simple, would impose
upon us)-must not be wanting in the picture of
Apollo: that measured limitation, that freedom
## p. 25 (#65) ##############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
25
from the wilder emotions that philosophical
calmness of the sculptor-god. His eye must be
“sunlike,” according to his origin ; even when it
is angry and looks displeased, the sacredness of
his beauteous appearance is still there. And so
we might apply to Apollo, in an eccentric sense,
what Schopenhauer says of the man wrapt in
the veil of Mâya *: Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,
1. p. 416: “ Just as in a stormy sea, unbounded
in every direction, rising and falling with howling
mountainous waves, a sailor sits in a boat and
trusts in his frail barque : so in the midst of a
world of sorrows the individual sits quietly sup-
ported by and trusting in his principium individu- Ac
ationis. ". Indeed, we might say of Apollo, that
in him the unshaken faith in this principium and
the quiet sitting of the man wrapt therein have
received their sublimest expression; and we might
even designate Apollo as the glorious divine image
of the principium individuationis, from out of
the gestures and looks of which all the joy and
wisdom of “appearance,” together with its beauty,
speak to us.
In the same work Schopenhauer has described
to us the stupendous awe which seizes upon man,
when of a sudden he is at a loss to account for
the cognitive forms of a phenomenon, in that the
principle of reason, in some one of its manifesta-
tions, seems to admit of an exception. Add to
this awe the blissful ecstasy which rises from the
* Cf. World and Will as Idea, 1. 455 ff. , trans. by Haldane
and Kemp.
## p. 26 (#66) ##############################################
26
THE PIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
innermost depths of man, ay, of nature, at this
same collapse of the principium individuationis,
and we shall gain an insight into the being of the
Dionysian, which is brought within closest ken
perhaps by the analogy of drunkenness. It is
either under the influence of the narcotic draught,
of which the hymns of all primitive men and
peoples tell us, or by the powerful approach of
spring penetrating all nature with joy, that those
Dionysian emotions awake, in the augmentation
of which the subjective vanishes to complete self-
forgetfulness. So also in the German Middle
Ages singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing
in number, were borne from place to place under
this same Dionysian power. In these St. John's
and St. Vitus's dancers we again perceive the
Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, with their previous
history in Asia Minor, as far back as Babylon
and the orgiastic Sacæa. There are some, who,
from lack of experience or obtuseness, will turn
away from such phenomena as “ folk-diseases”
with a smile of contempt or pity prompted by the
consciousness of their own health : of course, the
poor wretches do not divine what a cadaverous-
looking and ghastly aspect this very “health "
of theirs presents when the glowing life of the
Dionysian revellers rushes past them.
Under the charm of the Dionysian not only
is the covenant between man and man again
established, but also estranged, hostile or sub-
jugated nature again celebrates her reconciliation
with her lost son, man. Of her own accord earth
proffers her gifts, and peacefully the beasts of
## p. 27 (#67) ##############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
27
i
prey approach from the desert and the rocks.
The chariot of Dionysus is bedecked with flowers
and garlands: panthers and tigers pass beneath
his yoke. Change Beethoven's “jubilee-song":
into a painting, and, if your imagination be equal
to the occasion when the awestruck millions sink
into the dust, you will then be able to approach
the Dionysian. Now is the slave a free man,
now all the stubborn, hostile barriers, which neces-
sity, caprice, or “shameless fashion” has set up
between man and man, are broken down. Now,
at the evangel of cosmic harmony, each one feels
himself not only united, reconciled, blended with
his neighbour, but as one with him, as if the veil
of Mâyâ had been torn and were now merely
fluttering in tatters before the mysterious
Primordial Unity. In song and in dance man
exhibits himself as a member of a higher com-
munity: he has forgotten how to walk and speak,
and is on the point of taking a dancing Alight
into the air. His gestures bespeak enchantment.
Even as the animals now talk, and as the earth
yields milk and honey, so also something super-
natural sounds forth from him : he feels himself
a god, he himself now walks about enchanted
and elated even as the gods whom he saw
walking about in his dreams. Man is no longer
an artist, he has become a work of art: the
artistic power of all nature here reveals itself
in the tremors of drunkenness to the highest
gratification of the Primordial Unity. The
noblest clay, the costliest marble, namely man,
is here kneaded and cut, and the chisel strokes of
!
## p. 28 (#68) ##############################################
28
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
the Dionysian world-artist are accompanied with
the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries : “ Ihr stürzt
nieder, Millionen ? Ahnest du den Schöpfer,
Welt ? " *
-
2.
Thus far we have considered the Apollonian and
his antithesis, the Dionysian, as artistic powers,
which burst forth from nature herself, without the
mediation of the human artist, and in which her,
art-impulses are satisfied in the most immediate
and direct way: first, as the pictorial world of
dreams, the perfection of which has no connection
whatever with the intellectual height or artistic
culture of the unit man, and again, as drunken
reality, which likewise does not heed the unit
man, but even seeks to destroy the individual
and redeem him by a mystic feeling of Oneness.
Anent these immediate art-states of nature every
artist is either an “imitator," to wit, either an
Apolloniant an artist in dreams, or a Dionysian, an
artist in ecstasies, or finally—as for instance in
Greek tragedy—an artist in both dreams and
ecstasies : so we may perhaps picture him, as in
his Dionysian drunkenness and mystical self-mimet
abnegation, lonesome and apart from the revelling
choruses, he sinks down, and how now, through
Apollonian dream-inspiration, his own state, i. e. ,
* Ye bow in the dust, oh millions ?
Thy maker, mortal, dost divine ?
Cf. Schiller's "Hymn to Joy"; and Beethoven, Ninth
Symphony. -TR.
## p. 29 (#69) ##############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 29
his oneness with the primal source of the universe, \
reveals itself to him in a symbolical dream-picture^
After these general premisings and contrastings,
let us now approach the Greeks in order to learn
in what degree and to what height these art-
impulses of nature were developed in them:
whereby we shall be enabled to understand and
appreciate more deeply the relation of the Greek
artist to his archetypes, or, according to the
Aristotelian expression, " the imitation of nature. "
In spite of all the dream-literature and the]
numerous dream-anecdotes of the Greeks, we can
speak only conjecturally, though with a fair degree j
of certainty, of their dreams. Considering the
incredibly precise and unerring plastic power of
their eyes, as also their manifest and sincere
delight in colours, we can hardly refrain (to the
shame of every one born later) from assuming for
their very dreams a logical causality of lines and
contours, colours and groups, a sequence of scenes
resembling their best reliefs, the perfection of
which would certainly justify us, if a comparison-1
were possible, in designating the dreaming Greeks
as Homers and Homer as a dreaming Greek: in
a deeper sense than when modern man, in respect
to his dreams, ventures to compare himself with
Shakespeare.
On the other hand, we should not have to
speak conjecturally, if asked to disclose the im-
mense gap which separated the Dionysian Greek
from the Dionysian barbarian. From all quarters
of the Ancient World—to say nothing of the
modern—from Rome as far as Babylon, we can
;t j
## p. 30 (#70) ##############################################
30 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
prove the existence of Dionysian festivals, the
type of which bears, at best, the same relation to
the Greek festivals as the bearded satyr, who
borrowed his name and attributes from the goat,
does to Dionysus himself. In nearly every
instance the centre of these festivals lay in extra-
vagant sexual licentiousness, the waves of which
overwhelmed all family lite and its'Terierable
traditions; the very wildest beasts of nature were
let loose here, including that detestable mixture
of lust and cruelty which has always seemed to
me the genuine "witches' draught. " For some
time, however, it would seem that the Greeks
were perfectly secure and guarded against the
feverish agitations of these festivals (—the know-
ledge of which entered Greece by all the channels
of land and sea) by the figure of Apollo himself
rising here in full pride, who could not have held
out the Gorgon's head to a more dangerous power
than this grotesquely uncouth Dionysian. It is
in Doric art that this majestically-rejecting atti-
tude of Apollo perpetuated itself. This opposition
became more precarious and even impossible,
when, from out of the deepest root of the Hellenic
nature, similar impulses finally broke forth and
made way for themselves: the Delphic god, by a
seasonably effected reconciliation, was now con-
tented with taking the destructive arms from the
hands of his powerful antagonist. This reconcilia-
tion marks the most important moment in the
history of the Greek cult: wherever we turn our
eyes we may observe the revolutions resulting from
this event. It was the reconiiliation of two anta-
## p. 31 (#71) ##############################################
THE BIRT
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
OF
RAGE
31
gonists, with the sharp demarcation of the
boundary-lines to be thenceforth observed by
each, and with periodical transmission of testi-
monials ;-in reality, the chasm was not bridged
over. But if we observe how, under the pressure
of this conclusion of peace, the Dionysian power
manifested itself, we shall now recognise in the
Dionysian orgies of the Greeks, as compared with
the Babylonian Sacæa and their retrogression of
man to the tiger and the ape, the significance of
festivals of world-redemption and days of trans-
figuration. Not till then does nature attain her
artistic jubilee; not till then does the rupture of
the principium individuationis become an artistic
phenomenon. That horrible “witches' draught "
of sensuality and cruelty was here powerless: only
the curious blending and duality in the emotions
of the Dionysian revellers reminds one of it just
as medicines remind one of deadly poisons,--that
phenomenon, to wit, that pains beget joy, that
jubilation wrings painful sounds out of the breast.
From the highest joy sounds the cry of horror or
the yearning wail over an irretrievable loss. In
these Greek festivals a sentimental trait, as it were,
breaks forth from nature, as if she must sigh
over her dismemberment into individuals. The
song and pantomime of such dually-minded revel-
lers was something new and unheard-of in the
Homeric-Grecian world : and the Dionysian music
in particular excited awe and horror. If music,
as it would seem, was previously known as an
Apollonian art, it was, strictly speaking, only as
the wave-beat of rhythm, the formative power of 1
## p. 32 (#72) ##############################################
32 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
which was developed to the representation of Apol-
lonian conditions. The music of Apollo was
Doric architectonics in tones, but in merely
suggested tones, such as those of the cithara.
The very element which forms the essence of
Dionysian music (and hence of music in general)
is carefully excluded as un-Apollonian; namely,
the thrilling power of the fane, thejiniform stream
of the irielos^ and the thoroughly incomparable
world_of harmony. In the Dionysian dithyramb
man is incited to the highest exaltation of all
his symbolic faculties; something never before
experienced struggles for utterance—the annihila-
tion of the veil of Maya. . Oneness as genius of the
. race, ay. of nature. The essence of nature is now
to be expressed symbolically; a peat ""irlfl ftf
symbols, is required; for once the entire symbolism
oiUhe body,-not only the symbolism of the lips,
face, and speech, but the whole pantomime of
dancing which sets all the members into rhyth-
mical motion. Thereupon the other symbolic
powers, those of music, in rhythmics, dynamics,
and harmony, suddenly become impetuous. To
Ccomprehend this collective discharge of all the
symbolic powers, a man must have already attained
that height of self-abnegation, which wills to
express itself symbolically through these powers:
the Dithyrambic votary of Dionysus is therefore
understood only by those like himself! With
what astonishment must the Apollonian Greek
have beheld him! With an astonishment, which
was all the greater the more it was mingled with
the shuddering suspicion that all this was in
## p. 33 (#73) ##############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
33
reality not so very foreign to him, yea, that, like
unto a veil, his Apollonian consciousness only hid
this Dionysian world from his view.
3.
In order to comprehend this, we must take
down the artistic structure of the Apollonian
culture, as it were, stone by stone, till we behold
the foundations on which it rests. Here we
observe first of all the glorious Olympian figures of
the gods, standing on the gables of this structure,
whose deeds, represented in far-shining reliefs,
adorn its friezes.
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.
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1
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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
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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,
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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
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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. , , .
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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-
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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
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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
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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-
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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
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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
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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'
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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
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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. . . .
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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.
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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.
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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY
FROM THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC
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## 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
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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.
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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
We shall have gained much for the science of
æsthetics, when once we have perceived not only
by logical inference, but by the immediate certainty
of intuition, that the continuous development of
art is bound up with the duplexity of the Apollonian
and the Dionysian: in like manner as procreation
is dependent on the duality of the sexes, involving
perpetual conflicts with only periodically inter-
vening reconciliations. These names we borrow
from the Greeks, who disclose to the intelligent
observer the profound mysteries of their view of
art, not indeed in concepts, but in the impressively
clear figures of their world of deities. It is in
connection with Apollo and Dionysus, the two art-
deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there
existed in the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in
origin and aims, between the art of the shaper, the
Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of music, that of
Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies
run parallel to each other, for the most part openly
at variance, and continually inciting each other to
new and more powerful births, to perpetuate in
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22 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
them the strife of this antithesis, which is but
seemingly bridged over by their mutual term
"Art"; till at last, by a metaphysical miracle of
the Hellenic will, they appear paired with each
other, and through this pairing eventually generate
the equally Dionysian and Apollonian art-work
of Attic tragedy.
In order to bring these two tendencies within
closer range, let us conceive them first of all as the
\s f i separate art-worlds of dreamland and drunkenness;
between which physiological phenomena a con-
trast may be observed analogous to that existing
between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. In
dreams, according to the conception of Lucretius,
the glorious divine figures first appeared to the
souls of men, in dreams the great shaper beheld the
charming corporeal structure of superhuman beings,
and the Hellenic poet, if consulted on the mysteries
of poetic inspiration, would likewise have suggested
dreams and would haveofferedan explanation resem-
bling that of Hans Sachs in the Meistersingers :—
Mein Freund, das grad' ist Dichters Werk,
dass er sein Traumen deut' und merk'.
Glaubt mir, des Menschen wahrster VVahn
wird ihm im Traume aufgethan:
all' Dichtkunst und Poeterei
ist nichts als Wahrtraum-Deuterei. *
* My friend, just this is poet's task:
His dreams to read and to unmask.
Trust me, illusion's truths thrice sealed
In dream to man will be revealed.
All verse-craft and poetisation
Is but soothdream interpretation.
~
## p. 23 (#63) ##############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
23
The beauteous appearance of the dream-worlds, 2
in the production of which every man is a perfect
artist, is the presupposition of all plastic art, and
in fact, as we shall see, of an important half of 2
poetry also. We take delight in the immediate
apprehension of form; all forms speak to us; there
is nothing indifferent, nothing superfluous. But,
together with the highest life of this dream-reality
we also have, glimmering through it, the sensation
of its appearance: such at least is my experience,
as to the frequency, ay, normality of which I
could adduce many proofs, as also the sayings of
the poets. Indeed, the man of philosophic turn
has a foreboding that underneath this reality in
which we live and have our being, another and
altogether different reality lies concealed, and that
therefore it is also an appearance; and Schopen-
hauer actually designates the gift of occasionally
regarding men and things as mere phantoms and
dream-pictures as the criterion of philosophical
ability. Accordingly, the man susceptible to art
stands in the same relation to the reality of dreams
as the philosopher to the reality of existence; he
is a close and willing observer, for from these
pictures he reads the meaning of life, and by these
processes he trains himself for life. And it is
perhaps not only the agreeable and friendly
pictures that he realises in himself with such
perfect understanding: the earnest, the troubled,
the dreary, the gloomy, the sudden checks, the
tricks of fortune, the uneasy presentiments, in
short, the whole “ Divine Comedy" of life, and
the Inferno, also pass before him, not merely like
## p. 24 (#64) ##############################################
24
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
pictures on the wall—for he too lives and suffers
in these scenes,—and yet not without that fleeting
sensation of appearance. And perhaps many a
one will, like myself, recollect having sometimes
called out cheeringly and not without success
amid the dangers and terrors of dream-life: “It
is a dream! I will dream on! ” I have likewise
been told of persons capable of continuing the
causality of one and the same dream for three and
even more successive nights : all of which facts
clearly testify that our innermost being, the
common substratum of all of us, experiences our
dreams with deep joy and cheerful acquiescence.
This cheerful acquiescence in the dream-
experience has likewise been embodied by the
Greeks in their Apollo: for Apollo, as the god of
all shaping energies, is also the soothsaying god.
He, who (as the etymology of the name indicates)
is the “shining one,” the deity of light, also rules
over the fair appearance of the inner world of
fantasies. The higher truth, the perfection of
these states in contrast to the only partially
intelligible everyday world, ay, the deep con-
sciousness of nature, healing and helping in sleep
and dream, is at the same time the symbolical
analogue of the faculty of soothsaying and, in
general, of the arts, through which life is made
possible and worth living. But also that delicate
line, which the dream-picture must not overstep
-lest it act pathologically in which case appear-
ance, being reality pure and simple, would impose
upon us)-must not be wanting in the picture of
Apollo: that measured limitation, that freedom
## p. 25 (#65) ##############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
25
from the wilder emotions that philosophical
calmness of the sculptor-god. His eye must be
“sunlike,” according to his origin ; even when it
is angry and looks displeased, the sacredness of
his beauteous appearance is still there. And so
we might apply to Apollo, in an eccentric sense,
what Schopenhauer says of the man wrapt in
the veil of Mâya *: Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,
1. p. 416: “ Just as in a stormy sea, unbounded
in every direction, rising and falling with howling
mountainous waves, a sailor sits in a boat and
trusts in his frail barque : so in the midst of a
world of sorrows the individual sits quietly sup-
ported by and trusting in his principium individu- Ac
ationis. ". Indeed, we might say of Apollo, that
in him the unshaken faith in this principium and
the quiet sitting of the man wrapt therein have
received their sublimest expression; and we might
even designate Apollo as the glorious divine image
of the principium individuationis, from out of
the gestures and looks of which all the joy and
wisdom of “appearance,” together with its beauty,
speak to us.
In the same work Schopenhauer has described
to us the stupendous awe which seizes upon man,
when of a sudden he is at a loss to account for
the cognitive forms of a phenomenon, in that the
principle of reason, in some one of its manifesta-
tions, seems to admit of an exception. Add to
this awe the blissful ecstasy which rises from the
* Cf. World and Will as Idea, 1. 455 ff. , trans. by Haldane
and Kemp.
## p. 26 (#66) ##############################################
26
THE PIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
innermost depths of man, ay, of nature, at this
same collapse of the principium individuationis,
and we shall gain an insight into the being of the
Dionysian, which is brought within closest ken
perhaps by the analogy of drunkenness. It is
either under the influence of the narcotic draught,
of which the hymns of all primitive men and
peoples tell us, or by the powerful approach of
spring penetrating all nature with joy, that those
Dionysian emotions awake, in the augmentation
of which the subjective vanishes to complete self-
forgetfulness. So also in the German Middle
Ages singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing
in number, were borne from place to place under
this same Dionysian power. In these St. John's
and St. Vitus's dancers we again perceive the
Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, with their previous
history in Asia Minor, as far back as Babylon
and the orgiastic Sacæa. There are some, who,
from lack of experience or obtuseness, will turn
away from such phenomena as “ folk-diseases”
with a smile of contempt or pity prompted by the
consciousness of their own health : of course, the
poor wretches do not divine what a cadaverous-
looking and ghastly aspect this very “health "
of theirs presents when the glowing life of the
Dionysian revellers rushes past them.
Under the charm of the Dionysian not only
is the covenant between man and man again
established, but also estranged, hostile or sub-
jugated nature again celebrates her reconciliation
with her lost son, man. Of her own accord earth
proffers her gifts, and peacefully the beasts of
## p. 27 (#67) ##############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
27
i
prey approach from the desert and the rocks.
The chariot of Dionysus is bedecked with flowers
and garlands: panthers and tigers pass beneath
his yoke. Change Beethoven's “jubilee-song":
into a painting, and, if your imagination be equal
to the occasion when the awestruck millions sink
into the dust, you will then be able to approach
the Dionysian. Now is the slave a free man,
now all the stubborn, hostile barriers, which neces-
sity, caprice, or “shameless fashion” has set up
between man and man, are broken down. Now,
at the evangel of cosmic harmony, each one feels
himself not only united, reconciled, blended with
his neighbour, but as one with him, as if the veil
of Mâyâ had been torn and were now merely
fluttering in tatters before the mysterious
Primordial Unity. In song and in dance man
exhibits himself as a member of a higher com-
munity: he has forgotten how to walk and speak,
and is on the point of taking a dancing Alight
into the air. His gestures bespeak enchantment.
Even as the animals now talk, and as the earth
yields milk and honey, so also something super-
natural sounds forth from him : he feels himself
a god, he himself now walks about enchanted
and elated even as the gods whom he saw
walking about in his dreams. Man is no longer
an artist, he has become a work of art: the
artistic power of all nature here reveals itself
in the tremors of drunkenness to the highest
gratification of the Primordial Unity. The
noblest clay, the costliest marble, namely man,
is here kneaded and cut, and the chisel strokes of
!
## p. 28 (#68) ##############################################
28
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
the Dionysian world-artist are accompanied with
the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries : “ Ihr stürzt
nieder, Millionen ? Ahnest du den Schöpfer,
Welt ? " *
-
2.
Thus far we have considered the Apollonian and
his antithesis, the Dionysian, as artistic powers,
which burst forth from nature herself, without the
mediation of the human artist, and in which her,
art-impulses are satisfied in the most immediate
and direct way: first, as the pictorial world of
dreams, the perfection of which has no connection
whatever with the intellectual height or artistic
culture of the unit man, and again, as drunken
reality, which likewise does not heed the unit
man, but even seeks to destroy the individual
and redeem him by a mystic feeling of Oneness.
Anent these immediate art-states of nature every
artist is either an “imitator," to wit, either an
Apolloniant an artist in dreams, or a Dionysian, an
artist in ecstasies, or finally—as for instance in
Greek tragedy—an artist in both dreams and
ecstasies : so we may perhaps picture him, as in
his Dionysian drunkenness and mystical self-mimet
abnegation, lonesome and apart from the revelling
choruses, he sinks down, and how now, through
Apollonian dream-inspiration, his own state, i. e. ,
* Ye bow in the dust, oh millions ?
Thy maker, mortal, dost divine ?
Cf. Schiller's "Hymn to Joy"; and Beethoven, Ninth
Symphony. -TR.
## p. 29 (#69) ##############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 29
his oneness with the primal source of the universe, \
reveals itself to him in a symbolical dream-picture^
After these general premisings and contrastings,
let us now approach the Greeks in order to learn
in what degree and to what height these art-
impulses of nature were developed in them:
whereby we shall be enabled to understand and
appreciate more deeply the relation of the Greek
artist to his archetypes, or, according to the
Aristotelian expression, " the imitation of nature. "
In spite of all the dream-literature and the]
numerous dream-anecdotes of the Greeks, we can
speak only conjecturally, though with a fair degree j
of certainty, of their dreams. Considering the
incredibly precise and unerring plastic power of
their eyes, as also their manifest and sincere
delight in colours, we can hardly refrain (to the
shame of every one born later) from assuming for
their very dreams a logical causality of lines and
contours, colours and groups, a sequence of scenes
resembling their best reliefs, the perfection of
which would certainly justify us, if a comparison-1
were possible, in designating the dreaming Greeks
as Homers and Homer as a dreaming Greek: in
a deeper sense than when modern man, in respect
to his dreams, ventures to compare himself with
Shakespeare.
On the other hand, we should not have to
speak conjecturally, if asked to disclose the im-
mense gap which separated the Dionysian Greek
from the Dionysian barbarian. From all quarters
of the Ancient World—to say nothing of the
modern—from Rome as far as Babylon, we can
;t j
## p. 30 (#70) ##############################################
30 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
prove the existence of Dionysian festivals, the
type of which bears, at best, the same relation to
the Greek festivals as the bearded satyr, who
borrowed his name and attributes from the goat,
does to Dionysus himself. In nearly every
instance the centre of these festivals lay in extra-
vagant sexual licentiousness, the waves of which
overwhelmed all family lite and its'Terierable
traditions; the very wildest beasts of nature were
let loose here, including that detestable mixture
of lust and cruelty which has always seemed to
me the genuine "witches' draught. " For some
time, however, it would seem that the Greeks
were perfectly secure and guarded against the
feverish agitations of these festivals (—the know-
ledge of which entered Greece by all the channels
of land and sea) by the figure of Apollo himself
rising here in full pride, who could not have held
out the Gorgon's head to a more dangerous power
than this grotesquely uncouth Dionysian. It is
in Doric art that this majestically-rejecting atti-
tude of Apollo perpetuated itself. This opposition
became more precarious and even impossible,
when, from out of the deepest root of the Hellenic
nature, similar impulses finally broke forth and
made way for themselves: the Delphic god, by a
seasonably effected reconciliation, was now con-
tented with taking the destructive arms from the
hands of his powerful antagonist. This reconcilia-
tion marks the most important moment in the
history of the Greek cult: wherever we turn our
eyes we may observe the revolutions resulting from
this event. It was the reconiiliation of two anta-
## p. 31 (#71) ##############################################
THE BIRT
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
OF
RAGE
31
gonists, with the sharp demarcation of the
boundary-lines to be thenceforth observed by
each, and with periodical transmission of testi-
monials ;-in reality, the chasm was not bridged
over. But if we observe how, under the pressure
of this conclusion of peace, the Dionysian power
manifested itself, we shall now recognise in the
Dionysian orgies of the Greeks, as compared with
the Babylonian Sacæa and their retrogression of
man to the tiger and the ape, the significance of
festivals of world-redemption and days of trans-
figuration. Not till then does nature attain her
artistic jubilee; not till then does the rupture of
the principium individuationis become an artistic
phenomenon. That horrible “witches' draught "
of sensuality and cruelty was here powerless: only
the curious blending and duality in the emotions
of the Dionysian revellers reminds one of it just
as medicines remind one of deadly poisons,--that
phenomenon, to wit, that pains beget joy, that
jubilation wrings painful sounds out of the breast.
From the highest joy sounds the cry of horror or
the yearning wail over an irretrievable loss. In
these Greek festivals a sentimental trait, as it were,
breaks forth from nature, as if she must sigh
over her dismemberment into individuals. The
song and pantomime of such dually-minded revel-
lers was something new and unheard-of in the
Homeric-Grecian world : and the Dionysian music
in particular excited awe and horror. If music,
as it would seem, was previously known as an
Apollonian art, it was, strictly speaking, only as
the wave-beat of rhythm, the formative power of 1
## p. 32 (#72) ##############################################
32 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
which was developed to the representation of Apol-
lonian conditions. The music of Apollo was
Doric architectonics in tones, but in merely
suggested tones, such as those of the cithara.
The very element which forms the essence of
Dionysian music (and hence of music in general)
is carefully excluded as un-Apollonian; namely,
the thrilling power of the fane, thejiniform stream
of the irielos^ and the thoroughly incomparable
world_of harmony. In the Dionysian dithyramb
man is incited to the highest exaltation of all
his symbolic faculties; something never before
experienced struggles for utterance—the annihila-
tion of the veil of Maya. . Oneness as genius of the
. race, ay. of nature. The essence of nature is now
to be expressed symbolically; a peat ""irlfl ftf
symbols, is required; for once the entire symbolism
oiUhe body,-not only the symbolism of the lips,
face, and speech, but the whole pantomime of
dancing which sets all the members into rhyth-
mical motion. Thereupon the other symbolic
powers, those of music, in rhythmics, dynamics,
and harmony, suddenly become impetuous. To
Ccomprehend this collective discharge of all the
symbolic powers, a man must have already attained
that height of self-abnegation, which wills to
express itself symbolically through these powers:
the Dithyrambic votary of Dionysus is therefore
understood only by those like himself! With
what astonishment must the Apollonian Greek
have beheld him! With an astonishment, which
was all the greater the more it was mingled with
the shuddering suspicion that all this was in
## p. 33 (#73) ##############################################
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
33
reality not so very foreign to him, yea, that, like
unto a veil, his Apollonian consciousness only hid
this Dionysian world from his view.
3.
In order to comprehend this, we must take
down the artistic structure of the Apollonian
culture, as it were, stone by stone, till we behold
the foundations on which it rests. Here we
observe first of all the glorious Olympian figures of
the gods, standing on the gables of this structure,
whose deeds, represented in far-shining reliefs,
adorn its friezes.
