Nietzsche was a precocious student, but though he wrote copiously from an early age, his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, or to give the first edition its full title, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, only appeared when he was 27. Its hostile reception in the academic world, where he had received such early advancement as to be appointed Professor of Classical Philology at Basle at the age of 24, should not have surprised him; but apparently it did. It meets no conceivable standards of rigour, let alone those that obtained in the study of the ancient Greeks. A broadside soon appeared over the name of an old enemy from his schooldays, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, who charged him with ignorance, distortion of the facts, and grotesque parallels between Greek culture and the modern world. Erwin Rohde, a staunch friend, replied in terms at least as pugnacious, and the kind of battle familiar in academic circles directed to those who offend against their canons ensued. Nietzsche had gained notoriety, but it was brief, and was the only kind of fame with which he was ever to be acquainted.
Readers ever since have been divided into those who find its rhapsodic style, and the content which necessitates it, intoxicating, and those who respond with bored contempt. Both are readily understandable. It is a whirlwind of a book, swept along by the intensity of its strange set of enthusiasms and its desire to cope with as many topics as possible in a short space, but masquerading as a historical account of why Greek tragedy lasted for so short a time, and arguing that it had recently been reborn in the mature works of Richard Wagner. Nietzsche had been a fanatical admirer of some of Wagner’s dramas since he encountered the score of Tristan und Isolde, which he and some friends had played on the piano and quasi-sung when he was sixteen (EH 11. 6; but see also Love, 1963). And he had met the composer and his then mistress Cosima, daughter of Liszt, in 1868, becoming their close friend in 1869, and visiting them often during the years that they lived in Tribschen on Lake Lucerne. There is no doubt that the whole subject-matter of BT had been discussed frequently during those visits, and that Wagner contributed substantially to the development of some of its central theses (Silk and Stem, 1981: ch. 3). But when he and Cosima received their copy of the book they were nevertheless bowled over by it. However much influence Wagner, who adored pseudo-historical speculation, may have had, there was enough that was new to him in the book for him to find it a revelation.
Generally sympathetic readers of the book have often regretted that its last ten sections are largely devoted to a consideration of Wagner’s art as the rebirth of Greek tragedy. Not only does the claim seem to them in itself absurd, but also they feel it detracts and distracts from the unity, such as it is, of the first two-thirds of BT. That is almost wholly to miss the point of the book’s endeavour, and of what Nietzsche spent his life trying to do. For what makes BT the indispensable start to Nietzsche’s writing career, for those who want to understand the underlying unity of his concerns, is the manner in which he begins with a set of issues which seem to be remote from the present time, but gradually reveals that his underlying concern is with culture, its perennial conditions, and the enemies of their fulfilment.
BT begins at a spanking pace, and the momentum never lets up. It is a good idea to read it for the first time as fast as one can, ignoring obscurities and apparent diversions from the central argument (that term being used in a generously broad sense). Such an initial reading certainly involves taking a lot on trust, but to subject it to critical scrutiny the first time through is a recipe for irritation and ennui. It is important to get the sense of flux which the book possesses and which is to some extent also its subject-matter. After the ‘Preface to Richard Wagner’ which mentions both ‘the serious German problem we are dealing with’ and the conviction that ‘art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life,’ Nietzsche begins the book proper with the claim ‘We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics when we have succeeded in perceiving directly, and not only through logical reasoning, that art derives its continuous development from the duality of the Apolline and Dionysiac.’ So within the space of a very few lines Nietzsche has shown that he is going to be advancing on three fronts. The first mentioned is that of the contemporary crisis in German culture, the second an audacious claim about the nature of metaphysics, and the third a concern with ‘the science of aethetics’. (For ‘science’ Nietzsche uses the word ‘Wissenschaft’, which covers any systematic investigation, and not what is meant by ‘science’ in English – this should be remembered throughout his work, or indeed any discussion in German.)
He rapidly moves on to dealing with the ‘opposition’ between the Apolline and the Dionysiac, but that should not be taken to mean that they are enemies. As his exposition unfolds, it immediately becomes clear that ‘These two very different tendencies walk side by side, usually in violent opposition to one another, inciting one another to ever more powerful births,’ until they seem ‘at last to beget the work of art that is as Dionysiac as it is Apolline – Attic tragedy.’ This kind of opposition which yet contrives to be immensely more fruitful than anything that could be produced by either of the opponents going it alone is characteristic of nineteenth-century German philosophy, its leading exponent being Hegel, a philosopher to whom Nietzsche was in general strongly antagonistic throughout his life, no doubt in part because of his attachment to Schopenhauer, whose loathing of Hegel was notorious. But in the elaboration of the opposition and its overcoming Nietzsche does not need any of the dialectical apparatus that Hegel encumbers himself with. For he can work out his scheme by means of images and examples, and that is what he does, though the examples are often used tendentiously.
The idea is that the Apolline is the art of appearance, indeed is appearance. Nietzsche invokes dreams to make his point, that at its most representative Apolline art has extraordinary clarity, giving hard edges to what it depicts, exemplifying the principium individuationis (the principle of individuation) which Schopenhauer had located as the major error that we suffer from epistemologically – we perceive and conceive of the world in terms of separate objects, including separate persons. As beings with sense organs and conceptual apparatus, we cannot avoid this fundamentally erroneous way of viewing the world; and for Schopenhauer it is responsible for many of our most painful illusions and experiences, though it is unclear that overcoming it should lead to our lives being any less frightful.
Nietzsche traded, in BT, on the confusions in Schopenhauer’s thought – it is nowhere evident that he was any more aware of them than Schopenhauer himself – to produce his own, somewhat independent, ‘artists’ metaphysics’, as he contemptuously refers to his procedure in the ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’, the magnificent introduction that he wrote to the third edition of the book in 1886, the year of selfreckoning. By that phrase ‘artists’ metaphysics’ he meant partly a metaphysics tailor-made to give art an importance that he later came to regard as preposterous; and partly the use of artistic or pseudoartistic methods to produce metaphysical views, testing them by their beauty rather than for their truth. One way of looking at BT is as a transcendental argument, in Kant’s sense. What that comes to in general is the following pattern: x is the case – the datum. What else must be the case in order for that (x) to be possible? Nietzsche’s datum is very unlike that found in any other philosopher, since it gives primacy to our aesthetic experience, normally low on the list of philosophical priorities, when it figures at all. He takes the experiences we have of Apolline art (sculpture, painting, above all the epic) and Dionysiac art (music, tragedy) as his data, and asks how the world must be in order for these experiences to be vouchsafed us. We have seen that he compares Apolline art to dreams; Dionysiac art is aligned rather, as a first indication of its nature, with intoxication, the low way in which the principle of individuation is felt to be overcome, the loss of clarity, and the merging of individualities.
Why do we need them both, once we have grasped that one is the representation of beautiful appearance, while the other enables us to experience reality so far as we can without being destroyed by it? Because we are so constructed that doses of reality must be reserved for special occasions, as the Greeks realized: for festivals (the first Bayreuth Festival was being planned while Nietzsche wrote, though it would not materialize until 1876). But there is more to it than that. There is nothing wrong with appearances, so long as we realize that that is what they are (this will always be a leading motif in Nietzsche’s work). As we saw, the Greek epic is an Apolline art form, and its proudest manifestation is of course the Iliad, a work that delights us with its lucidity and its hard edges. The Greeks who lived it were happy to make for themselves fictions of a realm of gods enjoying themselves at their expense – ‘the only satisfactory form of theodicy’, Nietzsche remarks memorably (BT 3). And at this level the formula which occurs twice in the first edition, and is repeated approvingly in the ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’, operates: ‘Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is the world justified’ (the formulations vary slightly). Since for the Greeks of the Homeric age existence on its barest terms would have been intolerable, they showed a heroic artistic instinct in turning their battle-bound lives into a spectacle. That is why they needed gods; not to console themselves with the thought of a better life hereafter, which has been the usual motivation for postulating another world, but to mark the distinction between any life they could lead and the immortal lives of the gods, who just because they were immortal could be as reckless and irresponsible as Homer shockingly, to us, shows them being. ‘Anyone who approaches these Olympians with a different religion in his heart, seeking elevated morals, even sanctity, ethereal spirituality, charity and mercy, will quickly be forced to turn his back on them, discouraged and disappointed’ (BT 3).
If we can give a sense, any longer, to the concept of the heroic – something about which Nietzsche had lifelong doubts – it is surely in getting an imaginative grasp on such a vision. This is Nietzsche’s first attempt to give force to a phrase that he became addicted to in his later work, ‘a pessimism of strength’. He was never callow enough to be an optimist, to think that life would ever become, in a way that a non-hero could appreciate it, wonderful. We, as non-heroes, can only concern ourselves with improving ‘the quality of life’ (one wishes Nietzsche were around to give what would be the only adequate comment on that appalling phrase). If we feel that it cannot be improved, we become pessimists, but sentimental, or as Nietzsche came to call it ‘Romantic’ ones, lamenting the miseries of life, and perhaps putting our laments into suitably emollient poetic form.
Nietzsche’s celebration of Homer and the heroes to whom he gave his version of immortality by writing the Iliad is enough to show that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with Apolline art. But it connives in an illusion, and so is inherently unstable, liable to lapse into something less worthy. As the Greeks became more aware of their relationship to the gods, the age of the epic, which refuses to probe where trouble is likely to be the outcome, gave rise to the age of the tragic. There are many ways in which Nietzsche expresses this momentous transition, most of them influenced by his passionate but short-lived discipleship of Schopenhauer. At the end of section 1 of BT he writes: ‘Man is no longer an artist [as he had been in creating the gods], he has become a work of art: the artistic power of the whole of nature reveals itself to the supreme gratification of the primal Oneness amidst the paroxysms of intoxication.’ At this still early point in BT we have the feeling, thrilled or exasperated according to our temperament, that Nietzsche is making it all up as he goes along. He has had a large number of profound and moving artistic experiences, not very many of other kinds, and he is trying to make sense of them in the only way a great critic, at least since the collapse of the Classical tradition in criticism, can do: by composing a work which seems, in its essential movement, to duplicate the strength and richness of those experiences.
In such a mode of procedure, words and phrases come first, then you think what you mean by them. It is a procedure which Nietzsche would use all his writing life, but would soon realize was not fitted to the mode of expression typical of a monograph with the appurtenances of an academic treatise. The passage that I quoted immediately above is a good example of that. Having characterized the Homeric Greeks as artists, thanks to their creative capacities with respect to inventing capricious deities (capacities that they had to have to endure life) he moves on to the idea that they become works of art themselves, but the movement is in the first place on the level of playing with words for a serious purpose. Then he has to justify it, having first explained what it means. The Schopenhauerian notion (which provided the framework in which his thinking could be done) that underlying all individual appearances is a single, fundamentally unchanging Oneness comes to his rescue, and he celebrates the tragedy-producing Greeks for making men into works of art, or in his alternative formulation, ‘artists of life’. They realize that to confront reality instead of loving beautiful appearances they must cope with the fact that life is au fond eternally destructive of the individual, and allow themselves to abandon their separateness, delighting in the Dionysiac art which was their stronghold against the Dionysiac festivals of the barbarians, at the centre of which ‘was an extravagant want of sexual discipline, whose waves engulfed all the venerable rules of family life. The most savage beasts of nature were here unleashed, even that repellent mixture of love and cruelty that I have always held to be a “witches’ brew”’ (BT 2).
Art, that is, always, even at its most Dionysiac, possesses form, and thus up to a point falsifies its subject-matter, which is a formless swirl of pain-cum-pleasure, with pain predominating. But it needs to perform this falsification, for otherwise we would find it unendurable. Thus much later in the book when he is discussing Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Nietzsche claims that it has to be a drama, because in dramas there are characters, i.e. individuals, which means that Apollo is playing his part. In Act III of the drama, Tristan the character interposes between us and Wagner’s music; Tristan mediates the experience which causes him to die, and we survive, having come as close as possible to direct contact with the primal reality. So tragic heroes are sacrificial victims, and we achieve ‘redemption’, a favourite term of Wagner’s as well as of Christians, which Nietzsche was shortly to regret having used, though in other contexts it went on serving his purpose.
I have vaulted over the intervening chapters of BT in order to show how Nietzsche tries to establish a continuity between Greek tragedy and Wagnerian music drama. The latter is bound, he thinks, to mean more to us than the former can because the music to which the Greek tragedies were performed has been lost, so we can only infer their effects from accounts of how their audiences responded to them: they were put into a state of Rausch (intoxication) which is only now once more available to us. This state is impossible except to a community of spectators, whose sense of loss of identity is an upmarket version of that felt by a contemporary football crowd. But we have to concentrate on the way that Rausch is produced, otherwise there will be no qualitative distinction between a football crowd and the audience at a tragedy. Before long Nietzsche came to feel, for complex reasons, that there was no significant distinction between an audience of Wagnerians and his equivalent of a band of lager louts. But that thought lay in the painful future. For the present he was intent on the regeneration of the spirit of community thanks to its members being united in a common ecstasy. That is ‘the seriously German problem that we are dealing with’, Nietzsche at this stage taking it that the Germans were the possessors of a sensitivity to ultimate truths and values which other nations are denied, thanks in large part to the richness of the Germans’ musical inheritance.
In between his opening statements about the duality of Apollo and Dionysus and the extraordinarily involved dialectic in which they fertilize one another in the closing sections of the book we get Nietzsche’s highly, not to say grotesquely, schematized version of the peaks (Aeschylus and Sophocles) and decline (Euripides) of Greek tragedy. His central thesis is that in the peaks the chorus predominates, so that the audience sees on stage its own reflection, raised to overpowering heights of suffering and transfiguration. But when Euripides, whose plays unfortunately survive in far greater numbers than those of his superior predecessors, arrives on the scene he manifests an interest in individuals, in psychology, and worst of all in the beneficial effects of rationality, or as Nietzsche tends to call it, ‘dialectic’. Nietzsche has no doubts that the corrupting influence on him was Socrates, fully deserving his hemlock not for his power over the youth of Athens, but over what might have been its continuing tragic greatness. ‘Euripides became the poet of aesthetic Socratism’ (BT 12).
The characteristic that makes Socrates so radically anti-tragic a figure is his belief in the omnipotence of reason – though one might point out that in the dialogues of Plato which scholars regard as most likely to be accounts of Socrates’ own views, not much progress is made, except of a negative kind. But Nietzsche’s portrayal of him survives this point:
In this quite abnormal character, instinctive wisdom appears only to hinder conscious knowledge at certain points. While in all productive people instinct is the power of creativity and affirmation, and consciousness assumes a critical and dissuasive role, in Socrates instinct becomes the critic, consciousness the creator – a monstrosity per defectum!
(BT 13)
The image of Socrates was never to let Nietzsche free; as with all the leading characters in his pantheon and anti-pantheon, his relationship with him remains one of tortured ambivalence. For Nietzsche did not think that the relationship between instinct and consciousness was as simple as he here pretends to. What he was sure of was
the optimistic element in dialectic, which rejoices at each conclusion and can breathe only in cool clarity and consciousness: that optimistic element which, once it had invaded tragedy, gradually overgrew its Dionysiac regions and forced itself into self-destruction – its death-leap into bourgeois theatre. We need only consider the Socratic maxims: ‘Virtue is knowledge, all sins arise from ignorance, the virtuous man is the happy man.’ In these three basic optimistic formulae lies the death of tragedy.
(BT 14)
It is a brilliant indictment, even if it has very little to do with Euripides. For it can be no accident that the great tradition of rationalism in Western philosophy has gone with an amazing uniformity of optimism, nor that we have to wait until Schopenhauer to encounter a philosopher who is a pessimist, and going with that an anti-rationalist, believing in the primacy of an irrational Will. The Western tradition has been inimical to tragedy, thanks to the co-operation of Platonism and Christianity, and its great tragedies, above all those of Shakespeare and Racine, are either removed from a theological context or in uneasy relationship to it. Not that Nietzsche is able to countenance Shakespeare as a fully-fledged tragedian, because of the absence of music. This puts him in an awkward position, which he deals with by almost total evasion. The one briefly sustained passage on Shakespeare in BT is brilliantly perceptive on Hamlet, as being a man who, having looked into the Dionysiac abyss, realizes the futility of all action – he is not a delayer but a despairer (BT 7). But how that can have the full tragic effect, if it does, is not something that he explores.
More damagingly still, Nietzsche does nothing to explain why there are so few musical tragedies; he seems to take it for granted that Wagner wrote them, though it seems clear to me that he did not. Indeed, one composer after another has used the sovereign powers of music to show that, however bad things may be on stage, they can be saved. What really impressed Nietzsche was the degree of ecstasy which music, unlike any other art, can induce. And since he accorded a traditionally high status to tragedy, as the art form which shows how we can survive even the apparently unendurable, he effected an amalgam of the two.
It is here that his allegiance to Schopenhauer is most damaging. For Schopenhauer too believed that music gives us direct access to the movements of the Will, since it is unmediated by concepts. But on his general account of the nature of the Will, eternally striving and necessarily never achieving, it is hard to see how or why we should take any pleasure in an art which puts us in immediate contact with it. One would have thought that the greater distance there is between us and reality, the less tormented we would be.
Nietzsche modifies Schopenhauer somewhat by claiming that the Primal One is a mixture of pain and pleasure, but as stated above pain predominates. What Nietzsche is doing is attempting to answer the traditional question: Why do we enjoy tragedy? He rightly dissociates himself from the traditional answers, viewing them as shallow and complacent. But in his effort to erect tragedy into an agent which transfigures the seemingly untransfigurable, he overshoots the mark, appearing himself to fall into the trap of equating the true and the beautiful, something which he later excoriated in satisfyingly vigorous terms. We want to ask him the question at this point that he was not to ask until more than a decade later: Why truth rather than untruth? What is it in us that urges us always to seek the truth?
It is not as if he has no answers to these questions in BT, but they remain obscure. And we shall not find him getting fully to the bottom of these issues until his last phase. What is noteworthy, though, is that he is already embarking on the central quest of his life: How can existence be made bearable, once we grasp what it is really like? The way he approaches it here is by quoting early on a story about Silenus, friend of Dionysus, who said ‘Miserable, ephemeral race, children of hazard and hardship, why do you force me to say what it would be much more fruitful for you not to hear? The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best for you is to die soon’ (BT 3). But though Silenus is ‘wise’, ultimately tragic wisdom (Nietzsche is constantly opposing Wissenschaft (knowledge, science) and Weisheit (wisdom), manages to trump even him. It does so, according to some pretty esoteric manoeuvres executed late in the book, by an elaborate interplay between the Apolline and the Dionysiac. Then comes his most suggestive remark: ‘The pleasure produced by the tragic myth has the same origin as the pleasurable perception of dissonance in music. The Dionysiac, with its primal pleasure experienced even in pain, is the common womb of music and the tragic myth’ (BT 24).
One might feel that this is what Schoenberg later called ‘the emancipation of the dissonance’ with a vengeance. For though we find music without dissonances to be resolved insipid, the world seems to present us rather with incessant dissonance, with odd moments of respite. But it is no good pressing the point at this stage. Nietzsche is indeed providing us with an artist’s metaphysic, in which the recalcitrance of the material to be organized is a stimulus to ever-greater feats of creation – but a creation that is also an imitation, so that we can say both that we are presented with reality, but that through being given form it is transformed.
At the beginning of the Duino Elegies, Rilke writes: ‘For Beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, / and we are so awed by it because it serenely disdains to annihilate us’ (trans. by Stephen Mitchell, slightly modified). That, one could fairly say, is the basic thought of BT. It is at the least disturbing, and may even be felt to be disgusting (Young, 1992: 54–5). It decisively obliterates the long-held distinction between the Sublime and the Beautiful, making the former into an all-important element in the latter. But that may be the least striking of its innovations. More significantly, it announces the determination which Nietzsche maintained throughout his career, and manifested heroically in his life, not to give pain an automatically negative role in life, something which he perhaps felt more oppressed by in the contemporary scene than anything else. At the same time, he was possessed by a vision of the world as a place of such horror that any attempt to give meaning to it in moral terms is simply impossible. That is why in the ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’, having criticized the book more harshly than anyone else had done, saying that he found it ‘impossible’, he still finds that ‘it already betrays a spirit which will defy all risks to oppose the moral interpretation and significance of existence’ (BT, ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’, 5). And a few lines further on he specifies ‘Christianity as the most extravagant elaboration of the moral theme that humanity has ever heard.’ Though there is hindsight operating here, it is true that he was always sensitive enough to suffering (other people’s – he was an incredible stoic about his own) to find an ‘explanation’ of it in terms of the good it does us, its being a retribution for our wrongdoings, and the rest of the clap-trap that rings down through the millennia intolerable.
BT may well be most of the awful things Nietzsche and others have accused it of, but it has proved a fecund source of inspiration for Classical scholars and anthropologists. It is also, thanks to its highlighting of the Apolline – Dionysiac duality, a book that has had a powerful influence on the vulgar imagination. It gains, too, from rereading; once one has the general movement clear, there are many particular insights that are not to be found elsewhere in Nietzsche. But it will never repay a certain kind of close reading, that which is in vogue today and looks for aporias, fissures, self-subversions, and the rest of the deconstructionist’s tool-kit. Only books which apparently achieve a consistency of thought which BT undeniably lacks will do that. Its consistency is to be found only in the enthusiasm with which Nietzsche is determined to weld together in a process of feeling his most cherished concerns, and his idols as manifesting them. It is, in other words, a young man’s book, less candid than his later ones about its closeness to its author. And, perhaps most strikingly, it is the most optimistic expression of a pessimistic world-view that has ever been penned.