The Birth of Tragedy
Metadata
- Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
Highlights
In the state prior to the act of writing, he does not claim to have had before or within him an ordered causality of ideas, but rather a musical mood. (‘For me, feeling does not at first have a clearly defined object. This is only formed later on. A certain musical atmosphere of moods precedes it, and the poetic idea only comes afterwards.’) — location: 991
The ‘I’ of the lyric poet therefore sounds from the very depths of being: his ‘subjectivity’ in the sense used by modern aestheticians is a falsehood. When Archilochus, the first lyric poet among the Greeks, proclaims his raging love and at the same time his contempt for the daughters of Lycambes, it is not his passion that dances before us in orgiastic frenzy: we see Dionysus and the Maenads, we see the intoxicated reveller Archilochus sunk in sleep – as Euripides describes it in the Bacchae, asleep in a high mountain pasture in the midday sun – and now Apollo comes up to him and touches him with the laurel. — location: 1001
the lyric poet’s images are nothing but the poet himself, and only different objectifications of himself, which is why, as the moving centre of that world, he is able to say ‘I’: this self is not that of the waking, empirically real man, however, but rather the sole, truly existing and eternal self that dwells at the basis of being, through whose depictions the lyric genius sees right through to the very basis of being. — location: 1013
Thus all of our knowledge of art is utterly illusory, because we, as knowing subjects, are not identical with that being which, as sole creator and spectator of that comedy of art, prepares an eternal enjoyment for itself. Only in so far as the genius is fused with the primal artist of the world in the act of artistic creation does he know anything of the eternal essence of art; for in that state he is wonderfully similar to the weird fairy-tale image of the creature than can turn its eyes around and look at itself; now he is at once subject and object, at once poet, actor and audience. — location: 1050
Melody, then, is both primary and universal, which is why it can therefore bear various objectifications in various texts. It is also more important and necessary by far in the naïve estimation of the people. Melody gives birth to poetry, over and over again; — location: 1062
For in order to express its appearance in images, the lyric poet needs all the stirrings of passion, from the whisper of affection to the roar of madness; impelled to speak of music in Apolline symbols, he sees the whole of nature, and himself within it, as eternally willing, desiring, yearning. But in so far as he interprets music in images, he himself lies amidst the peaceful waves of Apolline contemplation, though all that he considers through the medium of music may be in urgent, driven motion. — location: 1091
within the music that compelled the lyric poet to use the language of images. — location: 1100
Plato gave posterity the model for a new art form – the novel. This might be described as ‘an infinitely enhanced Aesopian fable’, in which poetry is subordinated to dialectical philosophy just as philosophy had for centuries been subordinated to theology – as an ancilla. — location: 1652
For only in single instances of such destruction can we clearly see the eternal phenomenon of Dionysiac art, which expresses the will in its omnipotence, behind the principium individuationis, the eternal life that lies beyond the phenomenal world, regardless of all destruction. Metaphysical delight in the tragic is a translation of the image: the hero, the supreme manifestation of the will, is negated to our gratification, because he is only a phenomenon, and the eternal life of the will is left untouched by his destruction. ‘We believe in eternal life’ is tragedy’s cry; while music is the immediate idea of that life. — location: 1835
A metaphysical consolation wrests us momentarily from the bustle of changing forms. For a brief moment we really become the primal essence itself, and feel its unbounded lust for existence and delight in existence. Now we see the struggles, the torment, the destruction of phenomena as necessary, given the constant proliferation of forms of existence forcing and pushing their way into life, the exuberant fertility of the world will. We are pierced by the raging goad of those torments just as we become one with the vast primal delight in existence and sense the eternity of that delight in Dionysiac ecstasy. For all our pity and terror, we are happy to be alive, not as individuals but as the single living thing, merged with its creative delight. — location: 1847
One man will be enthralled by Socratic delight in knowledge and the delusion that it might heal the eternal wound of existence, while another will be caught up in the seductive veil of beauty, art, that floats before his eyes, and yet another will be gripped by the metaphysical consolation that beneath the whirlpool of phenomena eternal life flows indestructibly onwards: — location: 1929
culture is predominantly Socratic or artistic or tragic; or if we may be permitted historical exemplifications, Alexandrian, Hellenic or Indian (Brahman). — location: 1935
A storm seizes everything decrepit, rotten, broken, stunted; shrouds it in a whirling red cloud of dust and carries it into the air like a vulture. In vain confusion we seek for all that has vanished; for what we see has risen as if from beneath the earth into the gold light, so full and green, so luxuriantly alive, immeasurable and filled with yearning. Tragedy sits in sublime rapture amidst this abundance of life, suffering and delight, listening to a far-off, melancholy song which tells of the Mothers of Being, whose names are Delusion, Will, Woe. — location: 2137
He will thus be able to tell whether he is at all capable of understanding myth, the concentrated image of the world which, as an abbreviation for phenomena, cannot do without miracles. But in all likelihood almost everyone, having subjected himself to a rigorous examination, will feel so undermined by the critical-historical spirit of our culture that it is only by scholarly means and mediating abstractions that the former existence of myth can be made credible. Yet without myth all culture loses its healthy and natural creative power: only a horizon surrounded by myths can unify an entire cultural movement. — location: 2311
And here stands man, stripped of myth, eternally starving, in the midst of all the past ages, digging and scrabbling for roots, even if he must dig for them in the most remote antiquities. — location: 2322
For to say that life really is so tragic does not in the least help to explain the origin of an art form, provided that art is not only an imitation of the truth of nature but a metaphysical supplement to that truth of nature, coexisting with it in order to overcome it. — location: 2391
Accordingly, the tragic myth has to convince us that even ugliness and discord are an artistic game which the will, in the eternal abundance of its pleasure, plays with itself. But this primal and difficult phenomenon of Dionysiac art is only intelligible and can only be immediately grasped through the wonderful significance of musical dissonance: just as music alone, placed next to the world, can give us an idea of what we might understand by ‘the justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon’. The pleasure produced by the tragic myth has the same origin as the pleasurable perception of dissonance in music. The Dionysiac, with its primal pleasure experienced even in pain, is the common womb of music and the tragic myth. — location: 2403
Accordingly, the tragic myth has to convince us that even ugliness and discord are an artistic game which the will, in the eternal abundance of its pleasure, plays with itself. But this primal and difficult phenomenon of Dionysiac art is only intelligible and can only be immediately grasped through the wonderful significance of musical dissonance: just as music alone, placed next to the world, can give us an idea of what we might understand by ‘the justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon’. The pleasure produced by the tragic myth has the same origin as the pleasurable perception of dissonance in music. The Dionysiac, with its primal pleasure experienced even in pain, is the common womb of music and the tragic myth. — location: 2403