Birth of Tragedy i-v
Birth of Tragedy vi-xv,

Nietzsche:

Preface (1887) to The Birth of Tragedy

 

A Critical Backward Glance

 

Whatever it was that gave rise to this problematical work, of one thing there can be no question: the issue it propounded must have been supremely important and attractive as well as very personal to its author. The times in which (in spite of which) it was composed bear out that fact. The date is 1870~7I, the turbulent period of the Franco- Prussian war. While the thunder of the Battle of Worth was rumbling over Europe, a lover of subtleties and conundrums - father to be of this book - sat down i. an alpine recess, much bemused ar d bedeviled (which is'to say, both engrossed and detached) to pen the substance of that odd and forbidding work for which the following pages shall now serve as a belated preface or postscript. A few weeks later he could be discovered beneath the walls of Metz, still wrestling with the question mark which he had put after the alleged "serenity" of the Greeks and of Greek art; until at last, in that month of deep suspense which saw the emergence of peace at Versailles, he too made peace with himself and, still recovering from an ailment brought home from the field, gave final shape to The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music.

- From music? Music and tragedy? The Greeks and dramatic music? The Greeks and pessimistic art? The Greeks: this most beautiful and accomplished, this thoroughly sane, universally envied species of man - was it conceivable that they, of all people, should have stood in need of tragedy - or, indeed, of art? Greek art: how did it function, how could it?

By now the reader will have come to suspect where I had put my mark of interrogation. The question was one of value, the value placed on existence. Is pessimism inevitably a sign of decadence, warp, weakened instincts, as it was once with the ancient Hindus, as it is now with us modern Europeans?(Or is there such a thing as a strong pessimism? A penchant of the mind for what is hard, terrible, evil, dubious in existence, arising from a plethora of health, plenitude of being? Could it be, perhaps, that the very feeling of superabundance created its own kind of suffering: a temerity of penetration, hankering for the enemy (the worth while enemy) so as to prove its strength, to experience at last what it means to fear something`What meaning did the tragic myth have for the Greek during the period of their greatest power and courage? And what of the Dionysiac spirit, so tremendous in its implications? What of the tragedy that grew out of that spirit?

Or one might look at it the other way round. Those agencies that had proved fatal to tragedy: Socratic ethics, dialectics, the temperance and cheerfulness of the pure scholar&emdash;couldn't these, rather than their opposites, be viewed as symptoms of decline, fatigue, distemper, of instincts, caught in anarchic dissolution? Or the "Greek serenity" of the later period as, simply, the glow of a sun about to set? Or the Epicurean animus against pessimism merely as the sort of precaution a suffering man might use? And as for "disinterested inquiry," so called: what, in the last analysis, did inquiry come to when judged as a symptom of the life process? What were we to say of the end (or, worse, of the beginning) of all inquiry? Might it be that the "inquiring mind" was simply the human mind terrified by pessimism and trying to escape from it, a clever bulwark erected against the truth? Something craven and false, if one wanted to be moral about it? Or, if one preferred to put it amorally, a dodge? Had this perhaps been your secret, great Socrates) Most secretive of ironists, had this been your deepest irony?

 

II

I was then beginning to take hold of a dangerous problem &emdash;taking it by the horns, as it were&emdash;not Old Nick himself, perhaps, but something almost as hot to handle: the problem of scholarly investigation. For the first time in history somebody had come to grips with scholarship&emdash;and what a formidable, perplexing thing it turned out to be! But the book, crysta ation of my youthful courage and suspicions, was an impossible book; since the task required fully matured powers it could scarcely be anything else. Built r from precocious, purely personal insights, all but incommunicable; conceived in terms of art (for the issue of scholarly inquiry cannot be argued on its own terms), this book addressed itself to artists or, rather, to artists with analytical and retrospective leanings: to a special kind of ~rtist who is far to seek and possibly not worth the seeking. I t was a book novel in its psychology, brimming with artists' secrets, its background a metaphysics of art; the work of a young man, written with the unstinted courage and melancholy of youth, defiantly independent even in those places where the author was paying homage to revered models. In short, a "first book," also in the worst sense of that term, and one that exhibited, for all the hoariness of its topic, every conceivable fault of adolescence. It was terribly diffuse and full of unpalatable ferment. All the same, if one examines its impact it may certainly be said to have proved itself&emdash;in the eyes of the few contemporaries who mattered and most signally in the eyes of that great artist, Richard Wagner, whom it addressed as in a dialogue. This fact alone should ensure it a discreet treatment on my part; yet I cannot wholly suppress a feeling of distaste, or strangeness, as I look at it now, after a lapse of sixteen years. I have grown older, to be sure, and a hundred times more exacting, but by no means colder toward the question propounded in that heady work. And the question is still what it was then, how to view scholarship from the vantage of the artist and art from the vantage of life.

 

III

Once again: as I look at it today my treatise strikes me as quite impossible. It is poorly written, heavy handed, embarrassing. The imagery is both frantic and confused. In spots it is saccharine to the point of effeminacy; the tempo is erratic; it lacks logical nicety and is so sure of its message that it dispenses with any kind of proof. Worse than that, it suspects the very notion of proof, being a book written for initiates, a "music" for men christened in the name of music and held together by special esthetic experiences, a shibboleth for the highbrow confraternity. Ari arrogant and extravagant book, which from the very first withdrew even more haughtily from the ruck of the intelligentsia than it did from the acknowledged barbarians; and which yet, as its impact has proved, knew then as it does now how to enlist fellow revelers and to tempt them into secret alleys, onto mysterious dancing grounds. Both the curious and the hostile had to admit that here was an unfamiliar voice, the disciple of an unrecognized god, hiding his identity (for the time being) under the skulIcap of the scholar, the ponderousness and broad dialectics of the German, the bad manners of the Wagnerite. Here was a mind with odd, anonymous needs; a memory rife with questions, experiences, secrets, all of which had the name Dionysos attached to them like a question mark. People would hint suspiciously that there was a sort of maenadic soul in this book, stammering out laborious, arbitrary phrases in an alien tongue&emdash;as though the speaker were not quite sure himself whether he preferred speech to silence. And, indeed, this "new soul" should have sung, not spoken. What a pity that I could not tell as a poet what demanded to be told! Or at least as a philologist, seeing that even today philologists tend to shy away from this whole area and e§ pecially from the fact that the area contains a problem, that the Greeks will continue to remain totally obscure, unimaginable beings until we have found an answer to the question, "What is the meaning of the Dionysiac spirit?"

 

IV

In my book I answered that question with the authority of the adept or disciple. Talking of the matter today, I would doubtless use more discretion and less eloquence; the origin of Greek tragedy is both too tough and too subtle an issue to wax eloquent over. One of the cardinal questions here is that of the Greek attitude to pain. What kind of sensibilitv did these people have? Was that sensibility constant, or did it change from generation to generation?

Should we attribute the ever increasing desire of the Greeks for beauty, in the form of banquets, ritual ceremonies, new cults, to some fundamental lack&emdash;a melancholy disposition perhaps or an obsession with pain? If this interpretation is correct&emdash;there are several suggestions in Pericles' (or Thucydides') great funeral oration which seem to bear it out&emdash;how are we to explain the Greek desire. both prior and contrary to the first, for ugliness, or the strict commitment of the earlier Greeks to a pessimistic doctrine? Or their commitment to the tragic myth, image of all that is awful, evil, perplexing, destructive, ominous in human existence? What. in short. made t e Greek mind turn to tragedy? A sense of euphoria maybe&emdash;sheer exuberance, reckless health, and power? But in that case, what is the significance, physiologically speaking, of that Dionvsiac frenzy hich gave nse to tragedv and comedv alike? Can frenzy be viewed as something that is not a symptom of decay, disorder, overripeness? Is there such a thing&emdash;let alienists answer that question&emdash;as a neurosis arising from health, from the youthful condition of the race? What does the y~t, expressed in the figure of the satyr, really mean? What was it that prompted the Greeks to embody the Dionysiac reveler&emdash;primary man&emdash;in a shape like that? Turning next to the origin of the tragic chorus: did those days of superb somatic and psychological health give rise, perhaps, to endemic trances, collective visions, and hallucinations? And are not these the same Greeks who, signally in the early periods, gave every evidence of possessing tragic vision: a will to tragedy, profound pessimism? Was it not Plato who credited frenzy with all the superlative blessings of Greece? Contrariwise, was it not precisely during their period of dissolution and weakness that the Greeks turned to optimism, frivolity, histrionics; that they began to be mad for logic and rational cosmology; that they grew at once "gayer" and "more scientific"? Why, is it possible to assume&emdash;in the face of all the up to date notions on that subject, in defiance of all the known prejudices of our democratic age&emdash;that the great optimistrationalist utilitarian victory, together with democracy, its political contemporary, was at bottom nothing other than a symptom of declining strength, approaching senility, somatic exhaustion&emdash;it, and not its opposite, pessimism? Could it be that Epicurus was an optimist&emdash;precisely because he suffered? . . .

The reader can see now what a heavy pack of questions this book was forced to carry. Let me add here the heaviest question of all, What kind of figure does ethics cut once we decide to view it in the biological perspective?

 

v

In the preface I addressed to Richard Wagner I claimed that art, rather than ethics, constituted the essential metahysical activity of man, while in the body of the book I made several suggestive~statements to the effect that existence could be just)fied only in esthetic terms. As a matter of fact, throughout the book I attributed a purely esthetic meaning&emdash;whether implied or overt&emdash;to all process: a kind of divinity if you like, God as the supreme artist, amoral, recklessly creating and destroying, realizing himself inditferently in whatever he does or undoes, ridding himself by his acts of the embarrassment of his riches and the strain of his internal contradictions. Thus the world was made to appear, at every instant, as a successful solution of God's own tensions, as an ever new vision projected by that grand sufferer for whom illusion is the only possible mode of ~ redemption. That whole esthetic metaphysics might be reI jected out of hand as so much prattle or rant. Yet in its essential traits it already prefigured that spirit of deep distrust and defiance which, later on, was to resist to the bitter end any moral interpretation of existence whatsoever. It is here that one could find&emdash;perhaps for the first time in history&emdash;a pessimism situated "beyond good and evil"; a "perversity of stance" of the kind Schopenhauer spent all his life fulminating against; a philosophy which dared place ethics among the phenomena (and so "demote" it) &emdash;or, rather, place it not even among the phenomena in the idealistic sense but among the "deceptions." Morality, on this view, became a mere fabrication for purposes of gulfing: at best, an artistic fiction; at worst, an outrageous imposture.

The depth of this anti-moral bias may best be gauged by noting the wary and hostile silence I observed on the subject of Christianity&emdash;Christianity being the most extravagant set of variation:,ver produced on the theme of ethics. No doubt, the purely esthetic interpretation and just)fication of the world I was propounding in those pages placed them at the opposite pole from Christian doctrine, a doctrine entirely moral in purport, using absolute standards: God's absolute truth, for example, which relegates all art to the realm of falsehood and in so doing condemns it. I had always sensed strongly the furious, vindictive hatred of life implicit in that system of ideas and values; and sensed, too, that in order to be consistent with its premises a system of this sort was forced to abominate art. For both art and life depend wholly on the laws of optics, on perspective and illusion; both, to be blunt, depend on the necessity of error. From the very first, Ghristianity spelled life loathing itself, and that loathing was simply disguised, tricked out, with notions of an "other" and "better" life. A hatred of the "world," a curse on the affective urges, a fear of beauty and sensuality, a transcendence rigged up to slander mortal existence, a yearning for extinction, cessation of all effort until the great "sabbath of sabbaths"&emdash;this whole cluster of distortions, together with the intransigent Christian assertion that nothing counts except moral values, had always struck me as being the most dangerous, most sinister form the will to destruction can take; at all events, as a sign of profound sickness, moroseness, exhaustion, biological etiolation. And since according to ethics (specifically Christian, absolute ethics) life will always be in the wrong, it followed quite naturally that one must smother it under a load of contempt and constant negation; must view it as an object not only unworthy of our desire but absolutely worthless in itself.

As for morality, on the other hand, could it be anything but a will to deny life, a secret instinct of destruction, a principle of calumny, a reductive agent&emdash;the beginning of the end?&emdash;and, for that very reason, the Supreme Danger? Thus it happened that in those days, with this problem book, my vital instincts turned against ethics and founded a radical counterdoctrine, slanted esthetically, to oppose the Christian libel on life. But it still wanted a name. Being a philologist, that is to say a man of words, I christened it rather arbitrarily&emdash;for who can tell the real name of the Antichrist?&emdash;with the name of a Greek god, Dionysos.

Have I made it clear what kind of task I proposed myself in this book? What a pity, though, that I did not yet have the courage (or shall I say the immodesty?) to risk a fresh language in keeping with the hazard, the radical novelty of my ideas, that I fumbled along, usmg terms borrowed from the vocabularies of Kant and Schopenhauer to express value judgments which were in fiagrant contradiction to the spirit or taste of these men! Remember what Schopenhauer has to say about tragedy, in the second part of his World as Will a'.d Idea. He writes: "The power of transport peculiar to tragedy may be seen to arise from our sudden recognition that life fails to provide any true satisfactions and hence does not deserve our loyalty. Tragedy guides us to the final goal, which is resignation." Dionysos had told me a very different story; his lesson, as I understood it, was anything but defeatist. It certainly is too bad that I had to obscure and spoil Dionysiac hints with formulas borrowed from Schopenhauer, but there is another feature of the book which seems even worse in retrospect: my tendency to sophisticate such insights as I had into the marvelous Greek issue with an alloy of up todate matters; my urge to hope where there was nothing left to hope for, all signs pointing unmistakably toward imminent ruin; my foolish prattle, prompted by the latest feats of German music, about the "German temper"&emdash;as though that temper had then been on the verge of discovering, or rediscovering, itself! And all this at a time when the German mind, which, not so very long ago, had shown itself capable of European leadership, was definitely ready to relinquish any aspirations of this sort and to effect the transition to mediocrity, democracy, and "modern ideas"&emdash; in the pompous guise, to be sure, of empire building. The intervening years have certainly taught me one thing if they have taught me nothing else: to adopt a hopeless and merciless view toward that "German temper," ditto toward German music, which I now recognize for what it really is: a thorough going romanticism, the least Greek of all art forms and, over and above that, a drug of the worst sort, especially dangerous to a nation given to hard drinking and one that vaunts intellectual ferment for its power both to intoxicate the mind and to befog it. And yet there remains the great Dionysiac question mark, intact, apart from all those rash hopes, those wrong applications to contemporarv matters, which tended to spoil my first book; remains even with regard to music. For the question here is (and must continue to be), "What should a music look like which is no longer romantic in inspiration, like the German, but Dionysiac instead?"

 

VII

&emdash;But, my dear chap, where on earth are we to find romanticism if not in your book? Can that profound hatred of "contemporariness," "actuality," "modern ideas" be carried any farther than you have carried it in your esthetic metaphysics&emdash;a metaphysics which would rather believe in nothingness, indeed in the devil himself, than in the here and now? Do we not hear a ground bass of rage and destructive fury growl through all your ear beguiling contrapuntal art&emdash;a fierce hostility to everything that is happening today, an iron will (not far removed from active nihilism) which seems to proclaim, "I'd rather that nothing were true than see you triumph and your truth?" Listen, you high priest of art and pessimism, to one of your own statements, that eloquent passage full of dragon killer's bravado and ratcatcher's tricks so appealing to innocent ears; listen to it and tell us, aren't we dealing here with the confession of a true romantic of the 1830'S, disguised as a pessimist of the 1850's? Can't we hear behind your confession the annunciatory sounds of the usual romantic finale: rupture, collapse, return, and prostration before an old faith, before the old God.... Come now, isn't your pessimistic work itself a piece of anti Hellenism and romantic moonshine, fit to "befog and intoxicate," a kind of drug&emdash;in fact, a piece of mus~c, and German music to boot? Just listen to this: "Let us imagine a rising generation with undaunted eyes, with a heroic drive towards the unexplored; let us imagine the bold step of these St. Georges, their reckless pride as they turn their backs on all the valetudinarian doctrines of optimism, preparing to 'dwell resolutely in the fullness of being': would it not be necessary for the tragic individual of such a culture, readied by his discipline for every contingency, every terror, to want as his Helena a novel art of metaphysical solace and to exclaim as Faust did:

And shall not 1, by mightiest desire,
In living shape that precious form acquire?.

'Would it not be necessary?"&emdash;no, indeed, my romantic fledglings, it would not be necessary. But it is quite possible that things&emdash;that you yourselves&emdash;might end that way: "metaphysically solaced" despite all your grueling self discipline and, as romantics usually do, in the bosom of the Church. But I would rather have you ream, first, the art of terrestrial comfort; teach you how to laugh&emdash;if, that is, you really insist on remaining pessimists. And then it may perhaps happen that one fine day you will, with a peal of laughter, send all metaphysical palliatives packing, metaphysics herself leading the great exodus. Or, to speak in the language of that Dionysiac monster, Zarathustra:

Lift up your hearts, my fellows, higher and higher! And the legs&emdash;you mustn't forget those! Lift up your legs too, accomplished dancers; or, to top it all, stand on your heads!

This crown of the man who knows laughter, this rosechaplet crown: I have placed it on my head, I have consecrated laughter. But not a single soul have I found strong enough to join me.

Zarathustra the dancer, the fleet Zarathustra, waving his wings, beckoning with his wings to all birds around him, poised for fiight, casual and cavalier&emdash;

Zarathustra the soothsayer, Zarathustra the laughing truthsayer, never out of sorts, never insisting, lover of leaps and tangents: I myself have put on this crown!

This crown of the laughter loving, this rose chaplet crown: to you, my fellows, do I fling this crown! Laughter I declare to be blessed; you who aspire to greatness, learn how to laugh!

Zarathustra PART IV, "Of Greater Men"

Sils-Maria, Upper Engadine, August 1886