Review: The Birth of Tragedy
Existentialism, Postmodernism, Reviews June 19th, 2008The Birth of Tragedy discusses the world view and theatre of the ancient Greeks and how it applies to the culture of his day. Nietzsche borrows several ideas from contemporaries, notably Hegelian dialectic and applies it to Dionysus (thesis), Apollo (antithesis) and Greek Tragedy(synthesis). The Dionysian and Apollonian tendencies were both said to be an answer to the “wisdom of Silenus”.
…King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word; till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: ‘Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of change and misery, why do ye compel me to tell you what it were most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is beyond your reach forever: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But second best for you - is quickly to die.’
This idea was echoed more recently by Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus - is a pointless task (or pointless life) better abandoned?
Nietzsche says there are three traditions that answer this question:
1) Dionysus, god of Wine and bringer of ritual ecstasy. His followers rejoice in life as it actually is including all tragedy and discord. Nietzsche closely identifies Dionysus with music, without words, as a mirror of the world in a similar way as Schopenhauer’s concept of music as pure will. In theater, Dionysus is linked with all tragic heroes caught in epic downfalls and myths. Reality is a subjective and is intuitively and instinctively understood.
The truly Dionysian music presents itself as such a general mirror of the universal will: the conspicuous event refracted in this mirror expands at once for our consciousness to the copy of an external truth. Section 17
Here the most profound instinct of life, that directed toward the future of life, the eternity of life, is experienced religiously — and the way to life, procreation, as the holy way. Twilight of the Idols
2) Apollo, god of the Sun and bringer of knowledge, reason, wisdom and plastic (visual) beauty. This movement flatly rejects Silenus and instead holds that man’s goal is to pursue knowledge which in turn leads to beauty, virtue and happiness. The lyricist takes precedence over the musician and the music only supports the words of the writer. The theater, characters become more like the audience and given realistic emotions. The protagonists are now intelligent slaves and cunning men and women while the classic heroes are parodied. This use of realistic characters often makes the story impossible to fit with the expected Apollonian outcome (intelligence/beauty is rewarded) so deus ex machina is used to resolve the story. This shift in style is attributed to Euripides and ultimately to Socrates. Mythology and subjectivity are destroyed and replaced by the theoretic, the objective and history.
“…hence the picture of the dying Socrates, as the man raised above the fear of death by knowledge and reason, is the sign about the entrance-gate of science reminding every one of its mission, namely, to make existence seem intelligible, and therefore justified.” Section 15
If we could conceive of an incarnation of dissonance -and what else is man? - then, that it might live, this dissonance would need a glorious illusion to cover its features with a veil of beauty. This is the true artistic function of Apollo… Section 25″
3) Buddhist tradition which, according to Nietzsche, agrees with Silenus’s nihilism.
Since it is impossible to reach either ideal completely, life and theater is said to be best understood as a synthesis of both the Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies.
For the more clearly I perceive in Nature those omnipotent art impulses [...] the more I feel myself impelled to the metaphysical assumption that the Truly-Existent [Dionysus?] and Primal Unity [Apollo?], eternal suffering and divided against itself [...] are compelled to apprehend as [...] empiric reality. Section 4.
After Socrates, Greek taste shifts towards the Apollonian and Socraties (and his cronies Plato and Aristotle) and culture is still operating under the same system today. People are still considered as rational individuals who can detach themselves from the world they are observing. The problem with the Apollonian ideal is that it is fatally flawed - as any post modernist will tell you!
And as thou hast forsaken Dionysus, Apollo hath also forsaken thee; rouse up all the passions from their haunts and conjure them into thy circle, sharpen and whet thy sophistical dialectic for the speeches of thy heroes - thy very heroes have but counterfeit, masked passions, and utter but counterfeit, masked words. Section 10
As we reach the limits of philosophic reason and consider the boundaries of science, we realize that much of the world is not yet intelligible - and most likely will never be. This fundamentally undermines the claim of Apollonian view.
“If ancient tragedy was diverted from its course by the dialectical desire for knowledge and the optimism of science, this fact might lead us to believe that there is an eternal conflict between the theoretic and the tragic world-view; and only after the spirit of science has been pursued to its limits, and its claim to universal validity destroyed by the evidence of these limits may we hope for a rebirth of tragedy…” Section 17
By emphasizing the objective viewpoint of individual members of the public (rather than subjective view of heroes), Euripides thought the “public” on stage could be a better judge of the play.
But “public,” after all, is only a word. In no sense is it a homogeneous and constant quantity. Why should the artist be bound to accommodate himself to a power whose strength lies merely in numbers? Section 11.
This instantly reintroduces the subjective back into what is intended to be objective. We are instantly drawn back to the Dionysian.
There is a great amount I did not understand in the book as Greek culture is fairly obscure. The style of Nietzsche is more restrained as he mentions other philosophers without pouring scorn on them - particularly notably are Kant and Schopenhauer - who he later rejected utterly. He does identify Socrates as a target at this early stage in his writing.
Anti Citizen One
June 22nd, 2008 at 10:20 am
Interesting thesis/review - and as you noted his style seems less abrasive!
I shall certainly look into this - particularly his thoughts on the unintelligibility of the world - particular at the ‘boundaries of science’.
Question - you mention that the third answer to the conundrum concerning what to do with a pointless life is to be found in Buddhism that Nietzsche equates with Silenus’s nihilism. Could you elaborate on this?
June 22nd, 2008 at 10:55 am
Although Nietzsche does not go into depth about Buddhism in the Birth of Tragedy, he does cover it in later work more extensively. It seems he analyses the role of happiness and suffering in Apollonian, Dionysian and Buddhist traditions. For Apollo, suffering is caused by ignorance, for Dionysus it is a necessary part of life and for Buddha it is cause by craving (see the Four Noble Truths). An attempt to abolish suffering and craving would be to deny the Dionysian rejoicing in all life. Nietzsche calls this nihilistic because to deny the world or to consider it as something to be escaped from is his definition of nihilism (due to him being a rather strong skeptic of metaphysics).
At a more literal level, the only way to reach Nirvana would be to cease to exist (in this world) - i.e. “What is best of all is beyond your reach forever: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing” as Silenus suggests.
AC1
June 22nd, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Interesting idea - I’ve just read a complimentary article on Nietzsche and Buddhism which suggests that a) he (and Schopenhauer) misinterpreted some of the concepts of Buddhist philosophy but that b) when re-formulated Nietzsche would be pleasantly suprised at the parallels between his ethics and that of Buddhism - a moving beyond good and evil.
Just one note - Nirvana is very difficult to pin down with a description - it is a non-rational and logico-elusive term. It isn’t nothingness in the sense of the absence or dissolution of something. But it is traditionally written about using via negativistic language. Cue widespread confusion!
Another key point is that suffering (the term is Dukkha) does not simply imply physical-mental suffering - or even existential suffering but entails spiritual ignorance (or sickness I would prefer to describe it). The true nature of suffering is nothingness, or unreality. There is no suffering, the flight from suffering that Buddhism entails is not so much life-negation but life-affirmation. It is about if you like dissolving the perspective of existential cognition that categorizes or ‘evaluates’ phenomenon into good/bad pain/pleasure etc.
These interprative errors can and perhaps ought to be forgiven though considering that Nietzsche was in many respects a pioneer of Buddhist studies in the west. And there is no denying how well-read he was. And ultimately his trail-blazing led to an increase in western scholarship in Buddhism and a cross-cultural exchange in buddhist philosophical exegesis, which has led to a new understanding of its core ideas.
June 25th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Oh I was going to mention Richard Strauss’s tone poem Thus Spake Zarathustra as an example of the Dionysian. The ending of the last movement (Song of the Night Wanderer) has a discordant ending with the key alternating between C major and B major but never resolves. Some sources have identified this as the “world riddle theme”. The ending is beautiful but the riddle is never solved.
I am not sure if Nietzsche would claim to have solved the world riddle but he probably would only claim to have posed the question. (I think the riddle they refer to is posed in the chapter “The Vision and The Enigma” but also seems to be answered in “The Convalescent”.)
AC1