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Not sure where this came from.
Nietzsche Birth of Tragety
Originally educated as a philologist, Nietzsche discusses the history of the
Greek tragedy, and introduces an intellectual dichotomy between the Dionysian
and the Apollonian (very loosely: reality undifferentiated by forms and like
distinctions versus reality as differentiated by forms, or the forms
themselves). Nietzsche claims life always involves a struggle between these two
elements, each battling for control over the existence of humanity. In
Nietzsche's words, "Wherever the Dionysian prevailed, the Apollonian was checked
and destroyed ... wherever the first Dionysian onslaught was successfully
withstood, the authority and majesty of the Delphic god Apollo exhibited itself
as more rigid and menacing than ever." Yet neither side ever prevails due to
each containing the other in an eternal, natural check, or balance.
Nietzsche argues that the tragedy of Ancient Greece was the highest form of art
due to its mixture of both Apollonian and Dionysian elements into one seamless
whole, allowing the spectator to experience the full spectrum of the human
condition. The Dionysiac element was to be found in the music of the chorus,
while the Apollonian element was found in the dialogue which gave a concrete
symbolism that balanced the Dionysiac revelry. Basically, the Apollonian spirit
was able to give form to the abstract Dionysian.
Before the tragedy, there was an era of static, idealized plastic art in the
form of sculpture that represented the Apollonian view of the world. The
Dionysian element was to be found in the wild revelry of festivals and
drunkenness, but, most importantly, in music. The combination of these elements
in one art form gave birth to tragedy. He theorizes that the chorus was
originally always satyrs, goat-men. (This is highly speculative, but the word
“tragedy” does seem to have some connection or other with goats.) Thus, he
argues, “the illusion of culture was wiped away by the primordial image of man”
for the audience; they participated with and as the chorus empathetically, “so
that they imagined themselves as restored natural geniuses, as satyrs.” But in
this state, they have an Apollonian dream vision of themselves, of the energy
they're embodying. It’s a vision of the god, of Dionysus, who appears before the
chorus on the stage. And the actors and the plot are the development of that
dream vision, the essence of which is the ecstatic dismembering of the god and
of the Bacchantes' rituals, of the inseparable ecstasy and suffering of human
existence…
After the time of Aeschylus and Sophocles, there was an age where tragedy died.
Nietzsche ties this to the influence of writers like Euripides and the coming of
rationality, represented by Socrates. Euripides reduced the use of the chorus
and was more naturalistic in his representation of human drama, making it more
reflective of the realities of daily life. Socrates emphasized reason to such a
degree that he diffused the value of myth and suffering to human knowledge. For
Nietzsche, these two intellectuals helped drain the ability of the individual to
participate in forms of art, because they saw things too soberly and rationally.
The participation mystique aspect of art and myth was lost, and along with it,
much of man's ability to live creatively in optimistic harmony with the
sufferings of life. Nietzsche concludes that it may be possible to reattain the
balance of Dionysian and Apollonian in modern art through the operas of Richard
Wagner, in a rebirth of tragedy.
[edit] The Apollonian and the Dionysian
Main article: Apollonian and Dionysian
The most rudimentary aspects between these two conceptions seemingly contradict
each other. But for Nietzsche, the principles are intrinsically connected in an
interconflicting balance of strife, where one cannot be mentioned, invoked or
understood without the other. Indeed, despite Nietzsche's later disquisitions
about his "Dionysian world", he always maintained the Apollonian notion in the
foreground, that is, the latter was subsumed and thus was remolded into
Nietzsche's "Dionysian" conception found in his later writings. What is more,
the two principles (even though there is much debate among scholars to deem
specifically Nietzsche's significations of the two's association with each
other) are of an intimate, dynamic relationship consisting of a necessary mutual
exchange for their interplay and for the continual manifestation of their
energies—neither is superordinate to the other and each needs the other.
Dionysian ecstasy is balanced by Apollonian beauty while Apollonian beauty
tempers Dionysian ecstasy.
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[edit] Influences
The Birth of Tragedy is a young man's work, and shows the influence of many of
the philosophers Nietzsche had been studying. His interest in classical Greece
as in some respects a rational society can be attributed in some measure to the
influence of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, (although Nietzsche departed from
Winckelmann in many ways). In addition, Nietzsche uses the term "naive" in
exactly the sense used by Friedrich Schiller. More important influences include
Hegel, whose concept of the dialectic underlies the tripartite division of art
into the Apollonian, its Dionysian antithesis, and their synthesis in Greek
tragedy. Also of great importance are the works of Arthur Schopenhauer,
especially The World as Will and Representation. The Apollonian experience bears
great similarity to the experience of the world as "representation" in
Schopenhauer's sense, and the experience of the Dionysian bears similarities to
the identification with the world as "will." Nietzsche's work is significant in
part because it distills and combines these various strands of German idealism.
[edit] Reception
The Birth of Tragedy was angrily criticized by many respected professional
scholars of Greek literature. Particularly vehement was philologist Ulrich von
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who denounced Nietzsche's work as slipshod and
misleading. Prompted by Nietzsche, Erwin Rohde--a friend who had written a
favorable review that sparked the first derogatory debate over the
book--responded by exposing Wilamowitz-Moellendorf's inaccurate citations of
Nietzsche's work. Richard Wagner also issued a response to
Wilamowitz-Moellendorf's critique, but his action only served to characterize
Nietzsche as the composer's lackey.
In his denunciation of The Birth of Tragedy, Wilamowitz says:
Herr N. ... is also a professor of classical philology; he treats a series of
very important questions of Greek literary history. ... This is what I want to
illuminate, and it is easy to prove that here also imaginary genius and
impudence in the presentation of his claims stands in direct relation to his
ignorance and lack of love of the truth. ... His solution is to belittle the
historical-critical method, to scold any aesthetic insight which deviates from
his own, and to ascribe a "complete misunderstanding of the study of antiquity"
to the age in which philology in Germany, especially through the work of
Gottfried Hermann and Karl Lachmann, was raised to an unprecedented height.
In suggesting the Greeks might have had problems, Nietzsche was departing from
the scholarly traditions of his age, which viewed the Greeks as a happy, perhaps
even naive, and simple people. The work is a web of professional philology,
philosophical insight, and admiration of musical art. As a work in philology, it
was almost immediately rejected, virtually destroying Nietzsche's academic
aspirations. The music theme was so closely associated with Richard Wagner that
it became an embarrassment to Nietzsche once he himself had achieved some
distance and independence from Wagner. It stands, then, as Nietzsche's first
complete, published philosophical work, one in which a battery of questions are
asked, sketchily identified, and questionably answered.
Marianne Cowan, in her introduction to Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Tragic Age
of the Greeks, describes the situation in these words:
The Birth of Tragedy presented a view of the Greeks so alien to the spirit of
the time and to the ideals of its scholarship that it blighted Nietzsche's
entire academic career. It provoked pamphlets and counter-pamphlets attacking
him on the grounds of common sense, scholarship and sanity. For a time
Nietzsche, then a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel,
had no students in his field. His lectures were sabotaged by German philosophy
professors who advised their students not to show up for Nietzsche's courses.
By 1886, Nietzsche himself had reservations about the work, referring to The
Birth of Tragedy as "an impossible book . . . badly written, ponderous,
embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, saccharine to the point
of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, [and] without the will to logical cleanliness."
Its reception was such a personal disappointment that he referred to it, once,
as "falling stillborn from the press." Still, he defended the "arrogant and
rhapsodic book" for inspiring "fellow-rhapsodizers" and for luring them on to
"new secret paths and dancing places."
The book has been a major influence on Western intellectual life since its
initial publication.
[edit] Quotations
The joyous necessity of the dream experience has been embodied by the Greeks in
their Apollo: Apollo, the god of all plastic energies, is at the same time the
soothsaying god, He, who (as the etymology of the name indicates) is the
"shining one," the deity of light, is also ruler over the beautiful illusion of
the inner world of fantasy. [...] But we must also include in our image of
Apollo that delicate boundary which the dream image must not overstep lest it
have a pathological effect [...] We must keep in mind the measured restraint,
the freedom from the wilder emotions, that calm of the sculptor god. His eye
must be "sunlike," as befits his origin; even when it is angry and distempered
it is still hallowed by beautiful illusion [...] (translated by Walter Kaufmann)
[...] Schopenhauer has depicted for us the tremendous terror which seizes man
when he is suddenly dumbfounded by the cognitive form of phenomena because the
principle of sufficient reason, in some one of its manifestations, seems to
suffer an exception. If we add to this terror the blissful ecstasy that wells
from the innermost depths of man, indeed of nature, at this collapse of the
principium individuationis, we steal a glimpse into the nature of the Dionysian,
which is brought home to us most intimately by the analogy of intoxication.
(translated by Walter Kaufmann)
Even under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which songs of all
primitive men and peoples speak, or with the potent coming of spring that
penetrates all nature with joy, these Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow
in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness. In
the German Middle Ages, too, singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in
number, whirled themselves from place to place under this same Dionysian
impulse. [...] There are some who, from obtuseness or lack of experience, turn
away from such phenomena as from "folk-diseases," with contempt of pity born of
consciousness of their own "healthy-mindedness." But of course such poor
wretches have no idea how corpselike and ghostly their so-called
"healthy-mindedness" looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers roars
past them. (translated by Walter Kaufmann
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