Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy

Nietzsche thought of himself as a successor to Schopenhauer (the will is evil; suffering is essential to all life), however for Nietzsche the will has both ethical and metaphysical meanings.

The nature of Greek Tragedy is born out of a combination of Apollonian and Dionysian world views. Apollo is the God of visual arts, dreams and reason. Dionysus is the God of non-visual art and music. The Dionysian God represents human nature as sensual and emotional and is presented through the analogy of intoxication. A painting of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” would be close to a Dionysian experience. True tragedy is said not to have existed since the Greek period because there has been a loss in the balance between Apollonian and Dionysian themes.  

Every artist is an “imitator” of either Apollonian dream or Dionysian intoxication, or in the case of Greek Tragedy, a combination of both. Nietzsche believed that this combination created the perfect drama – A tragic hero who struggles to make sense (Apollonian) of his chaotic life (Dionysian) but ultimately fails. This struggle allows the audience to have a “connection with the heart of creation”.

Nietzsche hated Euripides(Greek playwright)  because he added a narrator. Nietzsche argued that this was destroying art and was effectively getting rid of the Dionysian aspect of tragedy. Euripides also took away the chorus, a mainly musical aspect sung by Satyrs, which represented animalistic thoughts. Instead he produced more realistic plays. This coincided with the Socratic movement towards rationalism. Nietzsche believed that understanding human existence wasn’t just down to reason, science cannot explain the mysteries of the universe, the will is also very important.

Nietzsche saw music as the most Dionysian form of art and Wagner expressed the urges of human will through his music, such as in “The Ring Cycle”, which is an apparent rebirth of tragedy.

His most famous quote “God is dead” was intended to illustrate that the Christian God was no longer a reasonable source for absolute moral principles. Fewer people are believing in God and God will die as people are losing absolute values of themselves. This loss of morality lead to nihilism and Nietzsche saw Christianity as quite nihilistic.

Nietzsche argued that we must look into artistic forms to understand our existence as they are the closest forms to human nature. This is similar to Schopenhauer’s immaterialism – the world does not exist independent of perception. This is also similar to Kant in that you can deduce by reason that there is a necessary, pre-existing something, which is a necessary condition for the existence of everything.

Schopenhauer also takes Kant’s idea of the duel nature of objects, the “noumenal” (things in themselves) and the “phenomenal” (our perception). It is almost exactly the same for Schopenhauer as it was for Kant, except for Schopenhauer there is only one undifferentiated “thing in itself” which he calls the “will”. The concept of the “will” in Schopenhauer is the same as it is for Nietzsche, “the will to power” or “the will to be”. The “will to power” is that every human has a function which we must embrace. Whereas Schopenhauer argued that everything which exists has a “will” and that will is “evil”, it represents people’s needs and desires which result in endless suffering.  Schopenhauer believed in the truths of Buddhist teachings-all life is suffering and all suffering is caused by desire. Schopenhauer wanted to deny the will but Nietzsche wanted to embrace it.