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Nietzsche's first book, published in 1872 when he was a young professor of classics, asks how the cheerful Greeks came to invent tragedy. His answer is a…
Nietzsche's first book, published in 1872 when he was a young professor of classics, asks how the cheerful Greeks came to invent tragedy. His answer is a struggle between two forces he names after gods: Apollo, who stands for form, order and the beautiful image, and Dionysus, who stands for intoxication, music and the dissolving of the self. Greek tragedy, he says, was born when the two were held together.
Context and significance
He also blames Socrates and Euripides for killing tragedy with reason, and ends by hailing Wagner's music as its rebirth. Classical scholars attacked the book harshly, but the Apollonian and the Dionysian became lasting terms for thinking about art. The later preface, in which Nietzsche criticises his own youthful book, is worth reading first.
About the author
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the son of a Lutheran pastor, was appointed professor of classical philology at Basel at only twenty-four. His friendship with the composer Richard Wagner shaped his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, and its bitter end shaped much of what followed. Ill health forced him to resign in 1879, and he spent ten restless years in Swiss and Italian lodgings, writing book after book.
In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and his later works he questioned morality, religion and truth itself. He collapsed in Turin in 1889 and never recovered; his sister later bent his work toward nationalist causes he had despised. Few philosophers have been so influential, or so often misread.