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Daily · Philosophy

The Birth of Tragedy

Friedrich Nietzsche · philosophy, 1872·5 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
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  • Nietzsche builds tragedy from two rival gods, not one tradition. He compares Apollo to dreaming and Dionysus to drunkenness, then argues Attic tragedy is "the equally Dionysian and Apollonian art-work" born when the two "appear paired with each other" (Section 1).
  • He roots the Dionysian in mass frenzy, not just art. He cites the medieval "St. John's and St. Vitus's dancers" as a European echo of the Bacchic choruses, tracing the impulse back "as far back as Babylon and the orgiastic Sacæa" (Section 1).
  • Euripides's own late play condemns his life's work. In the "Bacchæ," Euripides has Dionysus destroy his chief skeptic, Pentheus, a plot Nietzsche reads as an involuntary confession that purging tragedy of Dionysian force was "a protest against the practicability of his own tendency" (Section 12).
  • Nietzsche names the real villain behind Euripides: Socrates. He writes that "the deity that spoke through him was neither Dionysus nor Apollo, but an altogether new-born demon, called Socrates," recasting the whole argument as "the Dionysian and the Socratic" (Section 12).
  • Rational stage-craft gets blamed for killing suspense on purpose. Nietzsche points to the Euripidean prologue, a character opening the play by flatly stating what is about to happen, as proof Euripides valued "daring intelligibility" over the epic pull of not knowing what comes next (Section 12).
  • The essay ends inside an imagined walk through Athens. A visitor wandering "under high Ionic colonnades" is answered by "an aged Athenian" who tells him "what sufferings this people must have undergone, in order to be able to become thus beautiful," before inviting him to "sacrifice with me in the temple of both the deities" (Section 25).
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: Nietzsche stages his entire later war on rationalism inside a book ostensibly about Greek stagecraft, naming Socrates himself as the demon who killed tragedy.

Nietzsche claims Greek tragedy was born from two warring gods, dreaming Apollo and drunken Dionysus, and then argues Socrates murdered it by making everything on stage explainable.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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