On The Birth of Tragedy - Friedrich Georg Jünger

From Friedrich Georg Jünger monograph Nietzsche, first published 1949.

Nietzsche was right when he called The Birth of Tragedy a ‘centaur’, right insofar as he united disparate figures in this book. The peculiar magic of the writing is clouded, but the careful reader will easily see what is out of place. The Kantian and Schopenhauerian systems fail to deal adequately with the questions they raise, and so too Wagner’s music, yet Nietzsche achieves his goal. He manages to make the Dionysian clear and distinguish it from its Apollonian counterpart. It was a discovery from which he would continue to profit, and rightly so, because in it there was much more than his contemporary readers could see. It opened up a world that seemed long lost, a world that no one could have dreamed of. A new way of thinking, a new knowledge of the Greeks is expressed here quite definitely.

It is such a powerful and compelling approach that it must have influenced the whole relation to the Greeks. It is a book with a new outlook, a book that teaches a new way of seeing. The enthusiasm is unquestionable. From this unscientific enthusiasm, at first rejected, benefits may be derived for a long time – and not only for science. The written form is also centauric because it abolishes boundaries, because its disparate ideas cannot fit into any discipline, because there is a struggle between art and science which did not end with Nietzsche himself. Clearly there is a tug-of-war between conflicting tendencies. To compare his influence with other writings, it is enough to remember Winkelmann’s first book, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Bildhauerkunst.¹

This book appeared in 1754, and it was immediately followed by two works in which Winkelmann collected and refuted objections to it. The difference in approach is obvious. Winkelmann and Lessing approached the Greeks through sculpture; they embarked on the path of Apollonian artistry that Goethe and Schiller had followed. On this path are Winkelmann’s Monumenti inediti and Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums,² and Lessing’s Laocoon. The other path leads through Klopstock and Hölderlin, and that is where Nietzsche comes in. Hölderlin was the only one who knew about the Dionysian; this knowledge runs so deep in his later hymns that none of his contemporaries took part in it. He remained so lost. The young Nietzsche, who loved Hölderlin, did not know the later hymns; he had to find his own way. There is nothing accidental in this discovery. It is no coincidence that two men of such high status turn to the same questions. We will see how decisive these questions were and how they express the dilemma: can man rise from the ashes, or must he succumb to a mechanised world of his own making?

Nietzsche would not have written this work if he had not taken Dionysus seriously. The whole study of ancient man now received a new direction. This first book by the young Nietzsche contains the basis for all his work, and all the questions that would later occupy him come from it. Anyone who returns to The Birth of Tragedy after reading subsequent works will be struck by the unity of this thought, which is entirely consistent with the thinker’s determination. But to understand this, we must not get bogged down in polemics, which at each stage are conducted differently and confuse everyone who does not recognise the ends to which his thinking was aimed. Polemics, if we go back to its origins, is not only a resistance that comes from outside, it is also a resistance that comes from thought itself. On this path, which leads to the fullness of contradiction, polemic is left aside. It is no more than the skin left by the snake as it is rejuvenated and renewed.

Only three of Nietzsche’s works can be considered great works: The Birth of Tragedy, Zarathustra, and The Will to Power. All the others, however important and revealing, have only a preparatory and transitory significance, or, like Ecce Homo, represent an end point. He develops two basic doctrines: the doctrine of the Eternal Return and the doctrine of the Übermensch. Everything else recedes into the background when compared to them.

A work like The Antichrist, polemical in every respect, has two tasks. In it Nietzsche not only sums up his attacks on Christianity, but also creates space for his own reflections. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche first enters a mythical situation. He enters with a scholarly approach and gives the impression of scientific investigation, but he deals with a subject that has nothing to do with science and cannot be the subject of a scientist’s study. He later complained that he ruined the concept not only by interfering with Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Wagner’s music, but also by the scientific perspectives and aesthetic categories into which he squeezed his thinking. But anyone who asks how he would have approached the subject differently will immediately touch upon the great contradiction that pervades his thinking, a contradiction that the Sorcerer discovers in Zarathustra, “One Fool! Only the Poet!” Only a Dionysian poet can interpret this theme authentically. From The Birth of Tragedy onwards, Nietzsche never leaves the Dionysian sphere. For him this world is the labyrinth of Minos and the rose garden of Midas.

He penetrates deeper and deeper. And already in his first great work, the bared, naked hymn slumbers in the form of a scientific treatise, breaks away from it, and tries to free itself from the constraints of conceptual constructions. In this dance-like struggle lies the magic of writing, “...how the wilderness of our tired culture, just described so grimly, is suddenly transformed when it is touched by Dionysian magic! A furious wind seizes all that is worn, rotten, broken, and used up, envelops it in a swirling cloud of red dust, and carries it away like an eagle into the sky. With bewilderment our eyes search for what has disappeared: for what they see has risen in golden light, from out of the pit, now so rich and green, so lush and lively, so radiant, immeasurable and longing. Tragedy sits in the midst of this abundance of life, suffering, and pleasure, in sublime delight, listening to a distant melancholy song – it speaks of the mothers of existence, whose names are Madness, Will, Woe. Yes, my friends, believe in the Dionysian life, as I do, and in the rebirth of tragedy. The time of the Socratic man has passed: crown yourselves with ivy, take the thyrsus stick, and do not be surprised if tigers and panthers flatteringly lie at your knees. Dare to be only tragic men, for you shall be redeemed. You will lead the Dionysian march from India to Greece! Prepare for hard battles, but believe in the wonders of your God!”

This is a strange invitation to the reader. There is something transposed and anticipated here. Young Nietzsche believes in the revival of tragedy, in the return of the tragic man. and his redemption. What will he be liberated from? From the “wildness of our tired culture,” where one can sense a “eudemonistic-social” tendency that opposes the tragic and wishes to put an end to all tragedy. The norm is inevitable everywhere. All phenomena are judged and evaluated according to their proximity or distance from Dionysus. Euripidean tragedy and Socratic thought are opposed to Dionysian tragedy. The task of Socratic irony is defined. It is a matter of individual investigation. For here already there begins a hard and drawn-out struggle against all epistemic idealism, against the grid of truth, against moralism, against the “true” world, against being and existence. The mythical situation is characterised by the fact that Nietzsche comes face to face with an imagined reality, begins to wander in the world of fiction. The world of fiction is not a Dionysian realm – an inner action. The true world turns out to be fictional when it is crossed on its way to Dionysus, for then, step by step, its claim to truth collapses, along with all the logic, all the moralism inherent in the conceptualisation of being. This is the decisive leap of the book; and it can be found in all his other writings.

The form in which these ideas emerge is highly inventive. The integration of music in the genesis of tragedy causes great confusion. Nietzsche is completely fascinated by Wagner. He still considers himself a pupil and predecessor of the master and pays homage to him in this book. Such a votive plaque cannot be affixed to Wagner a second time. His music touches Nietzsche with eruptive force. The third act of Tristan and Isolde evokes in him “the convulsive spreading of all the wings of the soul, the convulsive spreading of all the emotions,” this is what this music evokes in him. He puts it in line with Schopenhauer’s theory of music and connects it with the Apollonian and the Dionysian. This is a misunderstanding, as Schopenhauer’s view of art is based on the doctrine of the negation of the will. An echo of the friendly conversations that took place in the Villa Triebschen can be heard here. For Nietzsche, Wagner’s opera - not an opera, but a musical drama - is the climax before which all verbal dramas fail. For him, the addition of words to musical drama is only a temporary measure, for “music is the real idea of the world, drama is only a reflection of this idea, a shadowy image singled out from it.” This also seems odd, since Wagner set restrictions against the predominance of music over poetry in opera.

But it was also difficult for the young Nietzsche to praise Wagner as a poet, because his archaic language, his incomprehensible writing, his ignorance of metrical legality, his formation of meaning and words did not dispose him to it. In contrast to Nietzsche, it should be noted that the genesis of Greek tragedy cannot be reconstructed from the musical side, no matter how powerful Dionysian music was. Apollo and Pan also make music. The world of myth cannot be interpreted as a musical phenomenon without violence. For those who undertake it, dance would be the best starting point, for it involves all the Muses, and Terpsichore precedes them with the lyre and plectrum. Greek tragedy cannot be illuminated by Wagner’s opera, because it is neither opera, musical drama, nor singspiel. That tragedy “brings music to the fore, both for the Greeks and for us” is a statement that seems surprising today. With the Greeks? With us? What kind of tragedy would it be that was done so well? One need not even think of Shakespeare and English music here. And it would not be an exaggeration to think that language and words also have a field of their own, which develops rhythmically and metrically and which remains poetry in its own right and does not need to be translated into music. This field is not at all hostile to music, but it refuses to be drawn into it, to be disturbed by it or to be completely absorbed by it. When Nietzsche turned his back on Wagnerian music and broke with Wagner himself, he must have felt that the “birth of tragedy” hung in the air, robbed of its supports. In it lay something painful – a fine, never-ending pain. But such enterprises, as has been shown more than once, thrive only through misunderstanding, detours. He paid his debt of gratitude; he was the giver in that friendship, which cast his youth with a strong lustre.

We also have to ask ourselves whether Nietzsche’s idea of Greek tragedy as the culmination of all Greek development is sustainable. Isn’t it the final act of the great apocatastasis of Dionysus? God creates it, but it is also his final work. Tragedy no longer belongs to the mythical epoch, but is a work of art that completes itself in the historical epoch and must therefore also grapple with the conflict that arises between mythical and historical thinking. In tragedy, the mythical essence is destroyed as in a powerful and glorious flame. Tragedy does not derive from music, but from epic; the latter, in contrast, derives from the original myth. Tragedy and music develop together, and die together as the powerful Dionysian appeal to the Greek man wanes. It is at this point that philosophy and history, ethics and refinement, Euripides, Socrates, and the new Attic dithyramb emerge. It is a step from the imaginary and illusory world to the real world, a step which Nietzsche takes again. For this is where his thinking begins, this is where he places himself. It is this step that always occupies him, again, to the very end. Now we shall see how he develops it in Zarathustra and in The Will to Power, and what results he achieves in the process.

1. Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks.

2. History of the Art of Antiquity