Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy

Why not one more on Nietzsche? This is an analysis of the relationship between the Apollonian, Dionysian, and Socratic responses to life in his book, The Birth of Tragedy.

Art and music played a large role in the life of Friedrich Nietzsche. The great admiration that Nietzsche had in his younger days for Richard Wagner is indicative of this. In 1872, Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. While this book was a bit unusual since Nietzsche had just gotten his doctorate a few years earlier, yet there were no citations in the entire text, it is a valuable analysis of the arts and the tragic life. The book is an analysis of the relationship between the Apollonian and the Dionysian art forms and the tragic way of life. Nietzsche outlines the Apollonian and Dionysian art forms and compares them to the Socratic art form, which moves away from the tragic life and, to Nietzsche, is a sign of decadence.

The Apollonian world is the world of dreams and imagery. It is a response to life characterized by the imagistic arts such as painting, poetry, sculpting, and so on. It is a rendering of how the phenomenal world appears to us. This entails mental constructs reminiscent of dreams, in which our brain forms images that correspond with image schemes of the phenomenal world. Apollonian art is an attempt to bring some sort of differentiation between different things in that it shows individuation through imagery. Because of this individuation, there is some order to Apollonian art. It is an interpretation of the world through imagistic means that focuses on mental constructs of the apparent world.

The Dionysian art form and response to life is more of a chaotic one. Dionysian art is characterized in music and dance. For Nietzsche, music gave a more exact representation of life and how the world actually is. No mental constructs get in the way of music, it is more indicative of the true, unrestrained feeling of individual existence. The Dionysian response to life is life-affirming and at the same time a great letting go of all restraint and embracing the world as it is. The Dionysian throws caution to the wind and really experiences life in all its joy and misery.

Two examples of the Dionysian spirit are Arthur Rimbaud and Jim Morrison. Rimbaud, although a poet, wrote quite lyrically, with the words flowing into a melody. Rimbaud lived a short raucous life and did not take heed to any popular convention. In the late 1960's, Jim Morrison embraced life like few others have. He had read Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy was his favorite book because of the representation of the Apollonian and Dionysian responses to life. Morrison lived heartily, wanting to represent in music, what he felt in life. He was willing to live every experience that he could and paid the price, dying at an early age.

This leads to another aspect within the book, the tragic life. Nietzsche thought that both the Apollonian arts and the Dionysian arts were synthesized in the works of Sophocles and a few other Greek dramatists. A person who lives the tragic life realizes all of the meaninglessness and irrationality in the world, yet chooses to embrace that meaninglessness and live dangerously. The fate of the individual often does not make sense; the good are not always rewarded, the bad not always punished. Human efforts have little affect on one's fate. The only thing an individual can do is face up to his or her condition and just experience life fully. The Greek tragedy was the highest art form, according to Nietzsche, because of the blend of imagery, music, and dance.

Soon after this synthesis emerged, the Socratic response to life began to take shape in Greek culture. Socrates valued reason and order above all else, and the art that would bear his name exemplified this. Gone is the tragic life, the embracing of the meaninglessness and the focus on individual existence. The Socratic response to life was actually critical of art and maintained the reason and science should be the primary pursuits of humans. There is no more embracing of the unknowable as there was in art, but now for Plato, everything was knowable through reason. Feeling was pushed backward as rational order came into the world forcing a sort of decadence to take place within art.

Nietzsche admired the Dionysian spirit and the life affirmation that it represented. He also loved the tragic life in art that was the synthesis of the Apollonian and Dionysian responses to the world. It was the highest form of art. This did not last long as Socrates influence was felt in Greek society. With the emphasis being shifted away from feeling, tragedy, and the awareness of the impossibility of true, complete knowledge, and into reason and order, art would never recover.