The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~52,800 words · 251 passages
Cite this work
- APANietzsche. (n.d.). The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/the-birth-of-tragedy-or-hellenism-and-pessimism
- MLANietzsche. "The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/the-birth-of-tragedy-or-hellenism-and-pessimism.
- ChicagoNietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/the-birth-of-tragedy-or-hellenism-and-pessimism.
What it is about
The Birth of Tragedy (1872): his first book, and the one that cost him his academic career.
Context and history
The thesis — that Greek tragedy is born of the tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and that Socrates killed it with the optimism of reason — was unacceptable philology to the philologists and too new a philosophy for the philosophers. They tore it apart; at twenty-seven he held a chair, at thirty nobody would take his classes. The Apollonian/Dionysian distinction has outlived everything. English translation from the complete edition edited by Oscar Levy (1909-1913), the one in the public domain. It is over a century old and it shows. The original is GERMAN, and citation should follow the original: the catalogue holds two of them, Also sprach Zarathustra and Der Wille zur Macht; for the rest, only the translation is here.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Whatever may lie at the bottom of this doubtful book must be a question of 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 originated, the exciting period of the Franco-German war of 1870-71. While the thunder of the battle of Wörth 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 deep suspense, when peace was debated at Versailles, he too attained to peace with himself, and, slowly recovering from a disease brought home from the field, made up his mind definitely regarding 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?... 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 pessimism of _strength_? An intellectual predilection for what is hard, awful, evil, problematical in existenc