In rough outline, Nietzsche here sees Greek tragedy (i) as combining the separate virtues Schopenhauer ascribes to the visual arts and to music and (ii) as an antidote to the pessimism that pervaded Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Nietzsche was later scornful of his youthful attempt to find solace in tragedy and even more scornful of later parts of the book (not included in your anthology) in which he suggested that Wagner’s operas might revive something of the spirit of Greek tragedy in his own day. Here are a few selections from “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,”which Nietzsche added to a later edition of the work:
| Selections from Nietzsche, “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” §§2, 6, 7 [Translation: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, tr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 5, 10, 12.] | ||
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... I shall not suppress entirely just how unpleasant it [The Birth of Tragedy] now seems to me, how alien it seems, standing there before me sixteen years later—before eyes which are older and a hundred times more spoiled, but by no means colder, nor grown any more of a stranger to the talk which this reckless book first dared to approach: to look at science through the prism of the artist, but also to look at art through the prism of life.
... ... I now regret very much that I did not yet have the courage (or immodesty?) at that time to permit myself a language of my very own for such personal views and acts of daring, labouring instead to express strange and new evaluation in Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulation, |
things which fundamentally ran counter to both the spirit and taste of Kant and Schopenhauer.... [Near the end, Nietzsche comments on a statement, in §18 of the original book, that the “tragic man” of a new generation would be bound to desire “a new form of art, the art of metaphysical solace, in fact to desire tragedy”:] ... No, you should first learn the art of comfort in this world, you should learn to laugh, my young friends, if you are really determined to remain pessimists. Perhaps then, as men who laugh, you will some day send all attempts at metaphysical solace to Hell—with metaphysics the first to go! |
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Although the title of The Birth of Tragedy suggests an interest in the history of Greek drama, the historical references in Nietzsche’s account will not be our main concern. However, you should note that the historical order of three great Greek tragic poets ran as follows: Æschylus (525-456 BCE), Sophocles (496-406 BCE), Euripides (c. 480-406 BCE). (If you are curious, your selection from Aristotle’s Poetics contains a short history of Greek theater from his point of view, HK 100f.)
Here are some suggestions of what to look for in each of the selections we will be discussing:
• HK 498-504 (§§1-2). Here Nietzsche introduces his version of Schopenhauer’s distinction between visual arts and music in terms of a distinction between the “Apollonian” and “Dionysian.” (A warning: it may be a little hard to square Nietzsche’s comments about the principium individuationis with Schopenhauer’s; what Schopenhauer says can help to suggest what Nietzsche has in mind but don’t expect their views to match up perfectly.) Nietzsche also refers (though mainly outside the selections I’ve assigned) to Schiller’s distinction between the “naïve” and the “sentimental.”
• HK 514-517 (§6). This is a first indication of how the Apollonian and Dionysian might be combined. (Here you might look back to Schopenhauer’s comments on the relation between music and words on HK 492.)
• HK 525-527 (§8 from “According to this view ...”). This sketches the way in which they are combined in tragedy.
One issue we might discuss in class is the view, which Nietzsche shares with Schopenhauer, that in song (and other combinations of music with text), it is the music that is primary. Notice that Nietzsche compares the relation of music to words in folksong to the relation of music to pictures that might be associated with it, regarding the words and pictures as equally secondary. That suggests that someone who regards poetry as an art that is, in some sense, “higher” than music might see the music in song as an accompaniment that merely lends “charm” (in the way that some take the addition of color to lend a charm to form) while seeing the poetic text as more fundamental. What do you think? Are you closer to one or the other of these views—or does your view represent a third alternative?