The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche
812 passages indexed from The Birth of Tragedy (Friedrich Nietzsche) — Page 13 of 17
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The Birth of Tragedy, passage 359
The Titanic artist found in himself the daring belief that he could create men and at least destroy Olympian deities: namely, by his superior wisdom, for which, to be sure, he had to atone by eternal suffering. The splendid "can-ing" of the great genius, bought too cheaply even at the price of eternal suffering, the stern pride of the _artist_: this is the essence and soul of Æschylean poetry, while Sophocles in his Œdipus preludingly strikes up the victory-song of the _saint_.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 570
The Greeks are, as the Egyptian priests say, eternal children, and in tragic art also they are only children who do not know what a sublime play-thing has originated under their hands and--is being demolished.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 43
From the first he was never blind to the faults in his master's system, and in proof of this we have only to refer to an essay he wrote in the autumn of 1867, which actually contains a criticism of Schopenhauer's philosophy.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 260
One has only to reflect seriously on the linguistic difference with regard to colour, syntactical structure, and vocabulary in Homer and Pindar, in order to comprehend the significance of this contrast; indeed, it becomes palpably clear to us that in the period between Homer and Pindar the _orgiastic flute tones of Olympus_ must have sounded forth, which, in an age as late as Aristotle's, when music was infinitely more developed, transported people to drunken enthusiasm, and which, when their influence was first felt, undoubtedly incited all the poetic means of expression of contemporaneous man to imitation.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 756
But let him never think he can fight such battles without his household gods, without his mythical home, without a "restoration" of all German things I And if the German should look timidly around for a guide to lead him back to his long-lost home, the ways and paths of which he knows no longer--let him but listen to the delightfully luring call of the Dionysian bird, which hovers above him, and would fain point out to him the way thither.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 312
According to this view, then, we may call the chorus in its primitive stage in proto-tragedy, a self-mirroring of the Dionysian man: a phenomenon which may be best exemplified by the process of the actor, who, if he be truly gifted, sees hovering before his eyes with almost tangible perceptibility the character he is to represent.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 21
The sorrow which hung as a cloud over our branch of the family was our father's death, as the result of a heavy fall, at the age of thirty-eight. One night, upon leaving some friends whom he had accompanied home, he was met at the door of the vicarage by our little dog. The little animal must have got between his feet, for he stumbled and fell backwards down seven stone steps on to the paving-stones of the vicarage courtyard.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 289
Yet it is, not an arbitrary world placed by fancy betwixt heaven and earth; rather is it a world possessing the same reality and trustworthiness that Olympus with its dwellers possessed for the believing Hellene. The satyr, as being the Dionysian chorist, lives in a religiously acknowledged reality under the sanction of the myth and cult.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 137
In order to keep at a distance all the possible scruples, excitements, and misunderstandings to which the thoughts gathered in this essay will give occasion, considering the peculiar character of our æsthetic publicity, and to be able also to write the introductory remarks with the same contemplative delight, the impress of which, as the petrifaction of good and elevating hours, it bears on every page, I form a conception of the moment when you, my highly honoured friend, will receive this essay; how you, say after an evening walk in the winter snow, will behold the unbound Prometheus on the title-page, read my name, and be forthwith convinced that, whatever this essay may contain, the author has something earnest and impressive to say, and, moreover, that in all his meditations he communed with you as with one present and could thus write only what befitted your presence.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 714
He shudders at the sufferings which will befall the hero, and yet anticipates therein a higher and much more overpowering joy. He sees more extensively and profoundly than ever, and yet wishes to be blind. Whence must we derive this curious internal dissension, this collapse of the Apollonian apex, if not from the _Dionysian_ spell, which, though apparently stimulating the Apollonian emotions to their highest pitch, can nevertheless force this superabundance of Apollonian power into its service?
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 479
"Du siehst an mir, wozu sie nützt, Dem, der nicht viel Verstand besitzt, Die Wahrheit durch ein Bild zu sagen."[18]
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 86
From the dates of the various notes relating to it, _The Birth of Tragedy_ must have been written between the autumn of 1869 and November 1871--a period during which "a mass of æsthetic questions and answers" was fermenting in Nietzsche's mind. It was first published in January 1872 by E. W. Fritsch, in Leipzig, under the title _The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music._ Later on the title was changed to _The Birth of Tragedy, or Hellenism and Pessimism._
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 486
If tragedy absorbed into itself all the earlier varieties of art, the same could again be said in an unusual sense of Platonic dialogue, which, engendered by a mixture of all the then existing forms and styles, hovers midway between narrative, lyric and drama, between prose and poetry, and has also thereby broken loose from the older strict law of unity of linguistic form; a movement which was carried still farther by the _cynic_ writers, who in the most promiscuous style, oscillating to and fro betwixt prose and metrical forms, realised also the literary picture of the "raving Socrates" whom they were wont to represent in life.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 368
"Wir nehmen das nicht so genau: Mit tausend Schritten macht's die Frau; Doch wie sie auch sich eilen kann Mit einem Sprunge macht's der Mann."[13]
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 121
What, forsooth, were Schopenhauer's views on tragedy? "What gives"--he says in _Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,_ II. 495--"to all tragedy that singular swing towards elevation, is the awakening of the knowledge that the world, that life, cannot satisfy us thoroughly, and consequently is _not worthy_ of our attachment In this consists the tragic spirit: it therefore leads to _resignation_." Oh, how differently Dionysos spoke to me!
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 400
But this joy was not all: one even learned of Euripides how to speak: he prides himself upon this in his contest with Æschylus: how the people have learned from him how to observe, debate, and draw conclusions according to the rules of art and with the cleverest sophistications. In general it may be said that through this revolution of the popular language he made the New Comedy possible.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 765
And myth has displayed this life, in order thereby to transfigure it to us? If not, how shall we account for the æsthetic pleasure with which we make even these representations pass before us? I am inquiring concerning the æsthetic pleasure, and am well aware that many of these representations may moreover occasionally create even a moral delectation, say under the form of pity or of a moral triumph.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 296
In this sense the Dionysian man may be said to resemble Hamlet: both have for once seen into the true nature of things,--they have _perceived,_ but they are loath to act; for their action cannot change the eternal nature of things; they regard it as shameful or ridiculous that one should require of them to set aright the time which is out of joint.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 653
To what then does the mystery of this oneness of German music and philosophy point, if not to a new form of existence, concerning the substance of which we can only inform ourselves presentiently from Hellenic analogies?
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 319
The Dionysian excitement is able to impart to a whole mass of men this artistic faculty of seeing themselves surrounded by such a host of spirits, with whom they know themselves to be inwardly one. This function of the tragic chorus is the _dramatic_ proto-phenomenon: to see one's self transformed before one's self, and then to act as if one had really entered into another body, into another character. This function stands at the beginning of the development of the drama.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 566
The structure of the scenes and the conspicuous images reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself can put into words and concepts: the same being also observed in Shakespeare, whose Hamlet, for instance, in an analogous manner talks more superficially than he acts, so that the previously mentioned lesson of Hamlet is to be gathered not from his words, but from a more profound contemplation and survey of the whole.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 762
Now let this phenomenon of the æsthetic spectator be transferred to an analogous process in the tragic artist, and the genesis of _tragic myth_ will have been understood. It shares with the Apollonian sphere of art the full delight in appearance and contemplation, and at the same time it denies this delight and finds a still higher satisfaction in the annihilation of the visible world of appearance.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 778
My friends, ye who believe in Dionysian music, ye know also what tragedy means to us. There we have tragic myth, born anew from music,--and in this latest birth ye can hope for everything and forget what is most afflicting. What is most afflicting to all of us, however, is--the prolonged degradation in which the German genius has lived estranged from house and home in the service of malignant dwarfs. Ye understand my allusion--as ye will also, in conclusion, understand my hopes.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 560
Amidst the ceaseless change of phenomena the eternally creative primordial mother, eternally impelling to existence, self-satisfying eternally with this change of phenomena!"
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 451
As long as the sole ruler and disposer of the universe, the νοῡς, was still excluded from artistic activity, things were all mixed together in a chaotic, primitive mess;--it is thus Euripides was obliged to think, it is thus he was obliged to condemn the "drunken" poets as the first "sober" one among them.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 734
For he will thus be enabled to determine how far he is on the whole capable of understanding _myth,_ that is to say, the concentrated picture of the world, which, as abbreviature of phenomena, cannot dispense with wonder. It is probable, however, that nearly every one, upon close examination, feels so disintegrated by the critico-historical spirit of our culture, that he can only perhaps make the former existence of myth credible to himself by learned means through intermediary abstractions.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 484
Plato's main objection to the old art--that it is the imitation of a phantom,[19] and hence belongs to a sphere still lower than the empiric world--could not at all apply to the new art: and so we find Plato endeavouring to go beyond reality and attempting to represent the idea which underlies this pseudo-reality.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 287
An art indeed exists also here, as in certain novels much in vogue at present: but let no one pester us with the claim that by this art the Schiller-Goethian "Pseudo-idealism" has been vanquished.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 706
Should it have been established by our analysis that the Apollonian element in tragedy has by means of its illusion gained a complete victory over the Dionysian primordial element of music, and has made music itself subservient to its end, namely, the highest and clearest elucidation of the drama, it would certainly be necessary to add the very important restriction: that at the most essential point this Apollonian illusion is dissolved and annihilated.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 799
Perception, the yea-saying to reality, is as much a necessity to the strong as to the weak, under the inspiration of weakness, cowardly shrinking, and _flight_ from reality--the 'ideal.' ... They are not free to perceive: the decadents have _need_ of the lie,--it is one of their conditions of self-preservation.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 343
Only in this sense can we hope to be able to grasp the true meaning of the serious and significant notion of "Greek cheerfulness"; while of course we encounter the misunderstood notion of this cheerfulness, as resulting from a state of unendangered comfort, on all the ways and paths of the present time.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 120
You see which problem I ventured to touch upon in this early work?... How I now regret, that I had not then the courage (or immodesty?) to allow myself, in all respects, the use of an _individual language_ for such _individual_ contemplations and ventures in the field of thought--that I laboured to express, in Kantian and Schopenhauerian formulæ, strange and new valuations, which ran fundamentally counter to the spirit of Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as to their taste!
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 247
For this one thing must above all be clear to us, to our humiliation _and_ exaltation, that the entire comedy of art is not at all performed, say, for our betterment and culture, and that we are just as little the true authors of this art-world: rather we may assume with regard to ourselves, that its true author uses us as pictures and artistic projections, and that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art--for only as an _æsthetic phenomenon_ is existence and the world eternally _justified:_--while of course our consciousness of this our specific significance hardly differs from the kind of consciousness which the soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle represented thereon.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 554
Dionysian art therefore is wont to exercise--two kinds of influences, on the Apollonian art-faculty: music firstly incites to the _symbolic intuition_ of Dionysian universality, and, secondly, it causes the symbolic image to stand forth _in its fullest significance._ From these facts, intelligible in themselves and not inaccessible to profounder observation, I infer the capacity of music to give birth to _myth,_ that is to say, the most significant exemplar, and precisely _tragic_ myth: the myth which speaks of Dionysian knowledge in symbols.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 60
Even in Leipzig, it was reported that Jacob Burckhardt had said: "Nietzsche is as much an artist as a scholar." Privy-Councillor Ritschl told me of this himself, and then he added, with a smile: "I always said so; he can make his scientific discourses as palpitatingly interesting as a French novelist his novels."
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 189
Now the Olympian magic mountain opens, as it were, to our view and shows to us its roots. The Greek knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence: to be able to live at all, he had to interpose the shining dream-birth of the Olympian world between himself and them.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 652
Let us recollect furthermore how Kant and Schopenhauer made it possible for the spirit of _German philosophy_ streaming from the same sources to annihilate the satisfied delight in existence of scientific Socratism by the delimitation of the boundaries thereof; how through this delimitation an infinitely profounder and more serious view of ethical problems and of art was inaugurated, which we may unhesitatingly designate as _Dionysian_ wisdom comprised in concepts.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 478
We know what was the sole kind of poetry which he comprehended: the _Æsopian fable_: and he did this no doubt with that smiling complaisance with which the good honest Gellert sings the praise of poetry in the fable of the bee and the hen:--
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 338
[9] An eternal sea, A weaving, flowing, Life, all glowing. _Faust,_ trans. of Bayard Taylor.--TR.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 131
"Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher! And do not forget your legs! Lift up also your legs, ye good dancers--and better still if ye stand also on your heads!
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 32
Though as a child he was always rather serious, as a lad and a man he was ever inclined to see the humorous side of things, while his whole being, and everything he said or did, was permeated by an extraordinary harmony. He belonged to the very few who could control even a bad mood and conceal it from others. All his friends are unanimous in their praise of his exceptional evenness of temper and behaviour, and his warm, hearty, and pleasant laugh that seemed to come from the very depths of his benevolent and affectionate nature. In him it might therefore be said, nature had produced a being who in body and spirit was a harmonious whole: his unusual intellect was fully in keeping with his uncommon bodily strength.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 61
"Homer and Classical Philology"--my brother's inaugural address at the University--was by no means the first literary attempt he had made; for we have already seen that he had had papers published by the _Rheinische Museum_; still, this particular discourse is important, seeing that it practically contains the programme of many other subsequent essays.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 307
And even as tragedy, with its metaphysical comfort, points to the eternal life of this kernel of existence, notwithstanding the perpetual dissolution of phenomena, so the symbolism of the satyric chorus already expresses figuratively this primordial relation between the thing in itself and phenomenon.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 327
The _chorus_ of Greek tragedy, the symbol of the mass of the people moved by Dionysian excitement, is thus fully explained by our conception of it as here set forth.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 280
And are we to own that he is the highest and purest type of spectator, who, like the Oceanides, regards Prometheus as real and present in body? And is it characteristic of the ideal spectator that he should run on the stage and free the god from his torments?
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 639
The features of the opera therefore do not by any means exhibit the elegiac sorrow of an eternal loss, but rather the cheerfulness of eternal rediscovery, the indolent delight in an idyllic reality which one can at least represent to one's self each moment as real: and in so doing one will perhaps surmise some day that this supposed reality is nothing but a fantastically silly dawdling, concerning which every one, who could judge it by the terrible earnestness of true nature and compare it with the actual primitive scenes of the beginnings of mankind, would have to call out with loathing: Away with the phantom!
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 255
_The strophic form of the popular song_ points to the same phenomenon, which I always beheld with astonishment, till at last I found this explanation.
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 795
And again, through my diagnosing Socrates as a decadent, I had given a wholly unequivocal proof of how little risk the trustworthiness of my psychological grasp would run of being weakened by some moralistic idiosyncrasy--to view morality itself as a symptom of decadence is an innovation, a novelty of the first rank in the history of knowledge. How far I had leaped in either case beyond the smug shallow-pate-gossip of optimism _contra_ pessimism!
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 559
Plastic art has an altogether different object: here Apollo vanquishes the suffering of the individual by the radiant glorification of the _eternity of the phenomenon_; here beauty triumphs over the suffering inherent in life; pain is in a manner surreptitiously obliterated from the features of nature. In Dionysian art and its tragic symbolism the same nature speaks to us with its true undissembled voice: "Be as I am!
The Birth of Tragedy, passage 126
Does not a radical bass of wrath and annihilative pleasure growl on beneath all your contrapuntal vocal art and aural seduction, a mad determination to oppose all that "now" is, a will which is not so very far removed from practical nihilism and which seems to say: "rather let nothing be true, than that _you_ should be in the right, than that _your_ truth should prevail!" Hear, yourself, my dear Sir Pessimist and art-deifier, with ever so unlocked ears, a single select passage of your own book, that not ineloquent dragon-slayer passage, which may sound insidiously rat-charming to young ears and hearts.