OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE The Birth of Tragedy Translated lPith an Introduction and Notes by DOUGLAS SMITH OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS For llimost JOO y~ars Oxford World's Classics Mve brought r~fIIkrs closer to tM world's gr~atliteratur~. Now 'II1itlt ov~r 700 titles-fro", tM 4o000-Y~lIr-01d ",ytlu ofM ~sopota"'ia to tlt~ l'fIJentieth century 's gr~at~st nov~ls-tM SnleS mak~s available lesser-ltnotlm as w~n as celebrated writing. The pocket-siud hardbacks of1 M early years contained introduaWns by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graha", Greene. and oth" literary figures whith enrich~d the experience ofr eading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that sjiln 'fIJor1d literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politits. Each ~dition inclurks perceptive cormnmtary and essential background information to ~el th~ changing nuds ofr eaders. OXFORD \1JfJVDalT'l ..... Great Clumdon Street, Oxford ou 60p <nford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It further. the University'. objective of exa:llence in 1'<$C8I'Ch, scholarsbip. and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athc:ns AuckJand Bangkok 8ogoIi Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delbi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Kanchi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sio Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw with aoociated companies in Berlin Ibadan <nford is a registen:d trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in =tain other COUDtms Publi,hed in the United Statcs by <nford Cnivenity Press Inc., New York Q Douglas Smith 2000 a.ronology ., Duncan Larg.: 199i First published as an Oxford World's Classics paperback 2~ All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system. or transmitted, in any form or by any mean .. without the prior permission in ... riting of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under ta'l115 agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Right. Department, <nford U ni"enity Press, at the address aho,·e. You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover ond you must impose this same condition on anyaequire< British LIbrary Cataloguing in Publication Data Data a,·tilable Library of Congress (.' .w aging in Publication Data Data a,·tilable ISBN 0-19-283292-1 13579108642 Typeset by RefineC'..atch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd., Reading, Berkshire CONTENTS Introduction VII Note on the Translation XXXVII Select Bibliography XXXVlll A Chronology of Friedrich Nietzsche xli THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY 1 Explanatory Notes 132 Index 165 INTRODUCTION The Birth of Tragedy is a book about beginnings and endings the beginning and end of Greek tragedy and the beginning and end of the decadence of nineteenth-century German culture. It also marks a beginning and end in Nietzsche's life-the begin ning of his career as a freelance philosopher and the end of his career as a professional academic. As befits a work so concerned with origins, it is a book which in its present form begins not once but twice, first with the preface to the second edition of 1886, then with the original dedication to Richard Wagner of 1872. This double beginning signals the difference between the early and the late Nietzsche, but also foregrounds one of the major themes of the book-the ambiguity of dual origins, particularly with respect to the twin impulses of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. This ambiguity points in turn to the ambiguity of the book itself as both a historical study of the origin of Greek tragedy and a manifesto for the regeneration of contemporary German culture through music. This introduction will examine these questions in the course of an exploration of The Birth of Tragedy in terms of its intellectual and historical contexts, its argument, and the subsequent development of Nietzsche's ideas and their legacy to later generations of writers and thinkers. Contexts Nietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy in 1872 at the age of 28, three years after being appointed Extraordinary Professor of Oassical Philology at the University of Basle in Switzerland. It was his first book and might have been expected to mark the first major step in an academic career. In fact, it provoked a polemic which was effectively to end his career as a professional classicist, partly because of its manifest, and at times overriding, concern with contemporary rather than ancient culture and philosophy. VlIl Introduction This concern was to motivate and inform all of Nietzsche's sub sequent work, although he would continue to refer to the examples of classical culture throughout his career. The close association between The Birth of Tragedy and contemporary pol itical events is signalled at points in the book by allusions to the recent Franco-Prussian War of 1870, in which Nietzsche briefly scrved as medical orderly before contracting dysentery and being invalided out of the army. In fact, Nietzsche wrote most of the book while on convalescent leave from the University of Basle in 1871. For the young Nietzsche, the recent military triumph over France and the subsequent foundation of the German Empire under Wilhelm I repres<mted an enormous opportunity for the cultural regeneration of the newly unified nation. For Nietzsche, as for many of his contemporaries, these hopes were invested in German music and in the work of the composer Richard Wagner in particular. To s)mpathetic contemporary listeners, Wagner's operas appeared to offer both an innovative musical aesthetics and a revival of traditional mythical content, elements of progress and continuity which appealed to a nation and culture in transition. Both elements-the aesthetics of music and myth-playa crucial role in The Birth of Tragedy. Pardy as a result of Wagner's theory and practice, the aesthetics of music occupied a central place in the European culture of the time. As a non-representational form of art, music appeared to offer an escape from the confines of mid-nineteenth-century realism and swiftly became the model art of the Symbolist movement, its status epitomized by Walter Pater's celebrated declaration of 1873 that 'all art aspires to the condition of music' (Studies in the History of the Renaissance). This music-based aesthetics in many ways marks the beginning of the 'art for art's sake' movement, with its insistence on the autonomy of art from outside forces and the primacy of aesthetic over moral criteria, a sentiment echoed in Nietzsche's repeated insistence in The Birth of Tragedy that existence can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon (§§ 5, 24). Furthermore, in more detailed formal terms, the tendency of contemporary music, and that of Wagner in particular, to move away from harmony Introduction IX through chromaticism towards dissonance offered to artists work ing in other media the example of an art freed from traditional notions of the beautiful and opened up the possibility of an aes thetics premised on jarring contrasts of style and content. The exemplary status ascribed to music received philosophical justification in the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, together with Wagner the most important early influence on Nietzsche's work. For Schopenhauer, music possessed an ontological significance unlike other more superficial arts, it revealed truths about the nature of being itself. The key to Schopenhauer's interpretation of music lies in his elaboration of two notions inherited from Immanuel Kant-the phenomenon (Erscheinung) and the thing in itself (Ding an sich). In the en"tique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant argues that the empirical world available to our senses is merely a world of phenomena, while the true essence of things, the things in themselves, remains beyond our perception. In The World as Will and Representation (18 I 8/ I 844), Schopenhauer retains this distinction, translating it into his own terms-thus Kant's phe nomenon becomes Schopenhauer's representation (Vorstellung) while Kant's thing in itself is identified by Schopenhauer as will (Wille). So the world as we experience it is a world ofrepresenta tions, one step removed from the world of the will, which is the essence of being. If we now relate this to the discussion of art, it is clear that representational art can only imitate the world we per ceive and so provide representations of representations, which are then.so to speak two steps removed from the ultimate reality of the will. Music, however, since it is a non-representational art, completely bypasses the world of representation and offers us direct unmediated access to the will. In philosophical terms, it is thus by far the most important of the arts. This view of the philosophical significance of music relative to the other arts informs the writings of both Wagner and Nietzsche and is essen tial to an understanding of Nietzsche's view of tragedy, where Schopenhauer's notions of the phenomenon and of will are associated with the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses respectively. Contemporary developments in music do not provide the sole x Introduction aesthetic context for the notions of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. In spite of the absence of any explicit link, it seems clear that the opposition between Apollonian and Dionysian echoes the eighteenth-century distinction between the beautiful (lias SchOne) and the sublime (das Erhabene), as first proposed by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical E"'luiry into the Origin ofo ur Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) and later elaborated by Kant in the Critique afJudgement (1790). In opposition to the finite and symmetrical nature of the beautiful, whose experience elicits pleasure in the viewer, the sublime induces fear through its lack of limits and recognizable form. This contrast between form and formlessness constil;Utes one of the keys to the relationship between the Apollonian and Dionysian as defined by Nietzsche, and in some respects the Dionysian might even be described as a radicalized version of the sublime. Perhaps the most explicit context for Nietzsche's early work, however, is that of German attitudes to the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. Nietzsche was by training and profession a classicist, but he was just as influenced by the artistic as by the academic uses to which the classical past was put. In general, these uses were twofold-either the classical past could be used to justify and reinforce the present culture by suggesting an identity and continuity between past and present, or the past could be used to criticize the present by stressing the difference and dis tance between them. Something of the former approach can be seen in the neo-classical architecture of Karl Friedrich Schinkel which in the early nineteenth century helped to give monumental form to the growing political power of post-Napoleonic Prussia and thus to prepare Berlin for its ultimate role as imperial capital after unification. The Doric revival in architecture, with its emphasis on the earliest and supposedly purest artistic forms, coincided with the theories of the classicist Karl Otfried Miiller, who argued that the Dorians were ethnically different from the other Greek tribes and were in fact of northern Germanic origin, thus providing a flattering precedent for the Prussian state. In contrast to this appropriation of the past for the purposes of aggrandizing the present, there existed in parallel the literary Introduction XI tradition of German Hellenism. From the late eighteenth cen tury, a distinguished line of German writers began to use the example of the classical civilization of Greece not only as a source of literary inspiration but also as a model for cultural renewal. Such writing often took the form of a critique of the deficiencies of contemporary culture when compared with the accomplish ments of the past. This use of the classical past to criticize the present is an important element in the work of such diverse writers as Winckelmann, Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin, and Heine, and represents an important attempt to counter the official use of the past to justify the present. In the poetry of Holderlin, for example, the project of mapping Greek culture onto German culture takes the form of a linguistic and topographical displacement-the German language is forced into Greek verse forms, while the geography of Germany is reconfigured as Greek landscape. In the process, the identity of German culture is estranged from itself and brought into question rather than sim ply confirmed by past precedent. Elements of both of these con trasting attitudes to the classical tradition exist in Nietzsche's early work-as in Miiller, there is a strong suggestion of a special and exclusive relationship between German and Greek culture, but at the same time, the Greek example is used to criticize the low level of contemporary German achievement. Nietzsche's ambivalence to the critical tradition of German Hellenism sur faces also in his view of the presentation of Greek culture to be found in writers such as Winckelmann and Schiller. In writing of Greek culture, the German Hellenists tended to present Greece as an idyllic lost world of innocence and harmony standing in stark contrast to the conflict and self-{;onsciousness of modern life. So, for Winckelmann in his Reflections on the Imita tion of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755), Greek art was characterized above all by 'noble simplicity and quiet grand eur' (edle Einfalt und stille GriifJe). In a similar vein, Schiller in his On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795) distinguished between the free and spontaneous (naIve) creativity of the Greeks and the problematic and self-{;onscious (sentimental) sensibility of the modern artist. Both writers thus contributed to the creation of