 Introduction of the Birth of Tragedy. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche Introduction. Friedrich Nietzsche was born at Rurken near Lutsen in the Prussian province of Saxony on the 15th of October, 1844, at 10 a.m. The day happened to be the anniversary of the birth of Friedrich William IV, then king of Prussia, and the appeal of the local church bells, which was intended to celebrate this event, was by a happy coincidence just time to greet my brother on his entrance into the world. In 1841, at the time when our father was tutor to the Altenberg princesses to race of Sax Altenberg, Elizabeth Grand Duchess of Oldenburg, and Alexandra Grand Duchess Constantine of Russia, he had had the honor of being presented to his witty empires sovereign. The meeting seems to have impressed both parties very favorably for very shortly after it had taken place, our father received his living at Rurken by supreme command. His joy may well be imagined, therefore when our first son was born to him on his beloved in August patron's birthday, and at the christening ceremony he spoke as follows. The blessed month of October for many years, the most decisive events in my life have occurred within that 31 days and now I celebrate the greatest and most glorious of them all by baptizing my little boy. In this full moment our exquisite festival, oh unspeakably holy duty, in the Lord's name I bless thee, with all my heart I utter these words, bring me this my beloved child that I may consecrate into the Lord. My son Frederick William thus shalt thou be named on earth as a memento of my royal benefactor on whose birthday thou wasst born. My father was 31 years of age and our mother not quite 19 when my brother was born. Our mother, who was the daughter of a clergyman, was good-looking and healthy and was one of a very large family of sons and daughters. Our maternal grandparents, the Reverend Uller and his wife in Pobles were typically healthy people. Strength, robustness, lively dispositions and a cheerful outlook on life were among the qualities which everyone was pleased to observe in them. Our grandfather Uller was a bright, clever man and quite the old style of comfortable country person who thought it no sin to go hunting. He scarcely had a day's illness in his life and would certainly not have met with his end as early as he did. That is to say before his 17th year, if his careless disregard of all caution where his health was concerned had not led to his catching a severe and fatal cold. In regard to our grandmother Uller, who died in her 82nd year, all that can be said is that if all German women were possessed of the health she enjoyed, the German nation would excel all others from the standpoint of vitality. She bore our grandfather 11 children, gave each of them the breast for nearly the whole of its first year and rid them all. It is said that the sight of these 11 children at age is varying from 19 years to one month with their powerful build, rosy cheeks, beaming eyes and wealth of curly locks provoke the admiration of all visitors. Of course, despite their extraordinary good health, the life of this family was not by any means all sunshine. Each of that children was very spirited, willful and obstinate and it was therefore no simple matter to keep them in order. Moreover, though they always showed the utmost respect and most implicit obedience to their parents, even as middle-aged men and women, misunderstandings between themselves were of constant occurrence. Our Uller grandparents were fairly well to do for our grandmother hailed from a very old family. They were extensive landowners in the neighborhood of Zeitz for centuries, and her father owned the baronial estate of the Litz and a magnificent seat near Zeitz in Park. When she married her father gave her carriages and horses, a coachman, a cook and a kitchen maid, which for the wife of a German minister was then and is still something quite exceptional. As a result of the wars in the beginning of the 19th century, however, our great grandfather lost the greater part of his property. Our father's family was also in fairly comfortable circumstances and likewise very large. Our grandfather, Dr. Nietzsche D.D., Doctor of Divinity and Superintendent, married twice and had in all twelve children of whom three died young. Our grandfather on this side, whom I never knew, must certainly have been a distinguished, dignified, very learned and reserved man. His second wife, our beloved grandmother, was an active-minded, intelligent and exceptionally good-natured woman. The whole of our father's family, which I only got to know when they were very advanced in years, were remarkable for their great power of self-control, their lively interest in intellectual matters, and a strong sense of family unity, which manifested itself both in their splendid readiness to help one another and in their very excellent relations with each other. Our father was the youngest son, and thanks to his uncommonly lovable disposition, together with other gifts, which only tended to become more marked as he grew older, he was quite the favorite of the family, blessed with a thoroughly sound constitution, as all avert who knew him at the convent school of Rostelman, at the university, or later at the Ducal Court of Altenburg, he was tall and slender, possessed an undoubted gift for poetry and real musical talent, and was, moreover, a man of delicate sensibilities full of consideration for his whole family and distinguished in his manners. My brother often refers to his Polish descent, and in later years he even instituted research work with the view of establishing it, which met with partial success. I know nothing definite concerning these investigations because a large number of valuable documents were unfortunately destroyed after his breakdown in Turin. The family tradition was that a certain Polish nobleman, Niki, pronounced Niecki, had obtained the special favor of Augustus, the strong king of Poland, and had received the rank of Earl from him. And when, however, Stanisław Laszyski, the Pole, became king, our supposed ancestor became involved in the conspiracy in favor of the Saxons and Protestants. He was sentenced to death, but taking flight according to the evidence of the documents, he was ultimately befriended by a certain Earl of Prule, who gave him a small post in an obscure little provincial town. Originally, our aged aunts would speak of our great-grandfather Nietzsche, who was said to have died in his 91st year, and words always seemed to fail them when they attempted to describe his handsome appearance, good-breeding and vigour. Our ancestors, both on that Nietzsche and the Ulur side, were very long-lived of the four pairs of great-grandparents. When the great-grandfather reached the age of 90, five great-grandmothers and fathers died between 82 and 86 years of age, and two only failed to reach their 70th year. 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 38. 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 grabbed between his feet. For he stumbled and fell backwards down seven stone steps on the paving stones of the vicarage courtyard. As a result of this fall, he was laid up with concussion of the brain, and after a lingering illness, which lasted 11 months, he died on the 30th of July, 1849. The early death of our beloved and highly gifted father spread gloom over the whole of our childhood. In 1850, our mother withdrew with us to Nomburg on the Salah, where she took up her abode with our widowed grandmother, Nietzsche. And there, she brought us up with Spartan severity and simplicity, which besides being typical of the period, was quite the regure in her family. Of course, Grandma Nietzsche helped somewhat to temper her daughter in law severity. And in this respect, our Ulur grandparents, who were less rigorous with us, their eldest grandchildren, than with their own children, were also very influential. Grandfather Ulur was the first who seemed to have recognized the extraordinary talents of his eldest grandchild. From as early as childhood upwards, my brother was always strong and healthy. He often declared that he must have been taken for a peasant boy throughout his childhood and youth, as he was so plump, brown, and rosy. The thick hair, which fell picturesquely over his shoulders, tended somewhat to modify his robust appearance. Had he not possessed those wonderfully beautiful large and expressive eyes, however, and had he not been so very ceremonious in his manner, neither his teachers nor his relatives would ever have noticed anything at all remarkable about the boy, for he was both modest and reserved. He received his early schooling at a preparatory school and later at a grammar school in Nomburg in the autumn of 1858. When he was 14 years of age, he entered the fourth school, so famous for the scholars it has produced. Their two very severe discipline prevailed and much was exacted from the pupils with the view of enuring them to great mental and physical exertions. Thus, if my brother seems to lay particular stress upon the value of rigorous training, free from all sentimentality, it should be remembered that he speaks from experience and disrespect. At four, he followed the regular school course and he did not enter a university until the comparatively late age of 20. His extraordinary gifts manifested themselves chiefly in his independent and private studies and artistic efforts. As a boy, his musical talent had already been so noticeable that he himself and other competent judges were doubtful as to whether he ought not perhaps to devote himself altogether to music. It is however worth noting that everything he did in his later years, whether in Latin, Greek or German work, bore the stamp of perfection subject of course to the limitation imposed upon him by his years. His talents came very suddenly to the fore because he had allowed them to grow for such a long time in concealment. His very first performance in philology executed while he was a student under Ritz School. The famous philologist was also typical of him in this respect scene, but it was ordered to be printed for the Rheiniska Museum. Of course, this was done amid general engraved expressions of doubt. First Doctor Ritz School often declared it was an unheard of occurrence for a student in his third term to prepare such an excellent treatise. Being a great lover of outdoor exercise such as swimming, skating and walking, he developed into a very sturdy lad. Rhoda gives the following description of him as a student with his healthy complexion, his outward and inner cleanliness, his austere chastity. In his solemn aspect, he was the image of that delightful youth described by Alder Barrett Stifter. 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 behavior and his warm hearty and pleasant life 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 only abnormal thing about him and something which we both inherited from our father was shortsightedness. And this was very much aggravated in my brother's case, even in his earliest school days, owing to that indescribable anxiety to learn which always characterized him. When one listens to accounts given by his friends and school fellows, one is startled by the multiplicity of his studies even in his school days. In the autumn of 1864, he began his university life in Bonn and studied philology and theology. At the end of six months he gave up the theology and in the autumn of 1865, followed his famous teacher at Ritt School to the University of Leipzig. There he became an ardent philologist and diligently sought to acquire a masterly grasp of this branch of knowledge. But in this respect, it would be unfair to forget that the School of Forte, with his staff of excellent teachers, scholars that would have adorned the chairs of any university, had already afforded the best of preparatory trainings to anyone intending to take up philology as a study, more particularly as it gave all pupils ample scope to indulge in the individual tastes they might have for any particular branch of ancient history. The last important Latin thesis, which my brother wrote for the land of school, Forte dealt with the Hungarian poet Theognis, and it was in the role of a lecturer on this very subject. Then on the 18th January 1866, he made his first appearance in public before the Philological Society, he had helped to found in Leipzig. The paper he read disclosed his investigations on the subject of Theognis, the moralist and aristocrat who, as is well known, described and dismissed the plebians of his time in terms of the heartiest contempt. The aristocratic ideal, which was always so dear to my brother, thus revealed itself for the first time. Moreover, curiously enough, he was precisely this scientific thesis, which was the cause of Ritt School's recognition of my brother and fondness for him. The whole of his Leipzig days proved of the utmost importance to my brother's career. There he was plunged into the very midst of a torrent of intellectual influences which found an impressionable medium in the fire youth and to which he eagerly made himself accessible. He did not, however, forget to discriminate among them, but tested and criticized the currents of thought he encountered and selected accordingly. It is certainly of great importance to ascertain what those influences precisely were to which he yielded and how long they maintained their sway over him. And it is likewise necessary to discover exactly when the matured mind threw off these fetters in order to work out its own salvation. The influences that exercise power over him in those days may be described in the three following terms, Hellenism, Schopenhauer, Wagner. His love of Hellenism certainly led him to philology, but as a matter of fact, what concerned him most was to obtain a wide view of things in general, and this he hoped to derive from that science philology in itself with his splendid method and thorough way of going to work served him only as a means to an end. If Hellenism was the first strong influence majority in Florida obtained a sway over my brother in the winter of 1865 to 66, a completely new and therefore somewhat subversive influence was introduced into his life with Schopenhauer's philosophy. When he reached Leipzig in the autumn of 1865, he was very downcast for the experiences that had befallen him during his one year of student life and bond had deeply depressed him. He had sought at first to adapt himself to his surroundings there with the hope of ultimately elevating them to his lofty views on things for both these efforts prove vain and now he had come to Leipzig with the purpose of framing his own manner of life. It can easily be imagined how the first reading of Schopenhauer's The World as will an idea worked upon this man still stinging from the bitterest experiences and disappointments. He writes here I saw a mirror in which I espied the world life and my own nature depicted with frightful grandeur. As my brother from his very earliest childhood had always missed both the parent and the educator through our fathers untimely death he began to regard Schopenhauer with almost filial love and respect. He did not venerate him quite as other men did Schopenhauer's personality was what attracted and enchanted him 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. Now in the autumn of 1865 do these two influences Hellenism and Schopenhauer a third influence was added one which was to prove the strongest ever exercised over my brother and it began with his personal introduction to Richard Wagner. He was introduced to Wagner by the letters sister frau professor broadcast and his description of their first meeting contained in the letter to Erwin Rota is really most affecting for years. That is to say from the time you lose arrangement of Tristan and his soldier for the piano forte had appeared it already been a passionate admirer of Wagner's music. But now that the artist himself entered upon the scene of his life with a whole fascinating strength of his strong will. My brother felt that he was in the presence of a being whom he evolved modern men resemble most in regard to force of character. Again in the case of Richard Wagner my brother from the first laid the utmost stress upon the man's personality and could only regard his works and views as an expression of the artist's whole being despite the fact that he by no means understood every one of those works at that time my brother was the first to ever manifested such enthusiastic affection for Schopenhauer and Wagner and he was also the first of that numerous band of young followers who ultimately inscribed the two great names upon their banner. Whether Schopenhauer and Wagner ever really corresponding to the glorified pictures my brother painted of them both in his letters and other writings is a question which we can no longer answer in the affirmative. Perhaps what he saw in them was only what he himself wished to be someday. The amount of work my brother succeeded in accomplishing during his student days really seems almost incredible when we examine his record for the years 1865 to 67. We can scarcely believe it refers to only two years industry for a guest no one would hesitate to suggest four years at least. But in those days as he himself declares he still possessed the Constitution of a bear. He knew neither what headaches nor indigestion meant and despite his short sight his eyes were able to endure the greatest strain without giving him the smallest trouble. That is why regardless of seriously interrupting his studies he was so glad at the thought of becoming a soldier in the forthcoming autumn of 1867. For he was particularly anxious to discover some means of employing his bodily strength. He just charged his duties as a soldier with the utmost mental and physical freshness was the crack rider among the recruits of his year and was sincerely sorry when owing to an accident he was compelled to leave the colors before the completion of his service. As a result of this accident he had his first dangerous illness. While mounting his horse one day the beast which was an uncommonly rested one suddenly reared in causing him to strike his chest sharply against the pommel of the saddle through him to the ground. My brother then made a second attempt to mount and succeeded this time notwithstanding the fact that he had severely sprained and torn two muscles in his chest and had seriously bruised the adjacent ribs. For a whole day he did his utmost to pay no heed to the injury and to overcome the pain it caused him. But in the end he only swooned Anna dangerously acute inflammation of the injured tissues was the result. Ultimately he was obliged to consult the famous specialist Professor Volkman in Hala who quickly put him right. In October 1868 my brother returned to his studies in Leipzig with double joy. These were his plans to get his doctor's degree as soon as possible to proceed to Paris Italy agrees make a lengthy stay in each place and then to return to Leipzig in order to settle there as a private docent. All these plans were however suddenly frustrated owing to his premature call to the University of Bale where he was invited to assume the duties of professor. One of the philological essays he had written in his student days in which were published by the Reyniska Museum had attracted the attention of the educational board at Bale. A lot share Bill Helm Bisher as representing this body appeal to Ritzko for fuller information. Now Ritzko who had early recognized my brother's extraordinary talents must have written a letter of such enthusiastic praise. Ritzko Bisher is a genius he can do whatever he chooses to put his mind to have one of the more cautious members of the council is such an observed. If the proposed candidate be really such a genius then it were better did we not appoint him. For in any case he would only stay a short time at the little University of Bale. My brother ultimately accepted the appointment and in view of his published philological works he was immediately granted the doctor's degree by the University of Leipzig. He was four years and six months old when he took up his position as professor in Bale. And it was with a heavy heart that he proceeded there for he knew the golden period of untrambled activity must cease. He was however inspired by the deep wish of being able to transfer to his people some of that Schopenhauer E.N. earnestness which is stamped on the bell of the sublime man. I should like to be something more than a mere trainer of capable philologists. The present generation of teachers the care of the growing broods all this is in my mind if we must live let us at least do so. In such wise that others may bless our life once we have been peacefully delivered from its toils. When I look back upon that month of May 1869 and ask both the friends of myself what the figure of this youthful university professor four and twenty meant to the world. At that time the reply is naturally in the first place that he was one of Ritzko's best pupils. Secondly that he was an exceptionally capable exponent of classical antiquity with a brilliant career before him. And thirdly that he was a passionate adorer of Wagner and Schopenhauer. But no one has any idea of my brother's independent attitude to the science he had selected to his teachers and to his ideas. And he deceived both himself and us when he passed as a disciple who really shared all the views of his respected master. On the 28th May 1869 my brother delivered his inaugural address at the University and it is said to have deeply impressed the authorities. The subject of the address was Homer and classical philology. Musing deeply the worthy counselors and professors walked home where had they just heard a young scholar discussing the very justification of his own science and a cool and philosophically critical spirit. A man able to impart so much artistic grammar to his subject that the once stale and arid study of philology suddenly struck them. And they were certainly not impressionable men as the messenger of the gods and just as the muses descended upon the dull and tormented be ocean peasants. So philology comes into a world full of gloomy colors and pictures full of the deepest most incurable woes and speaks to men comfortingly of the beautiful and brilliant godlike figure of a distant blue and happy fairy land. We have indeed got hold of a rare bird. Herr Ratscher said one of these gentlemen to his companion and that letter hardly agreed for my brother's appointment had been chiefly his doing. Even at Leipzig it was reported that Jakob Burkhardt had said Nietzsche is as much an artist as a scholar. Privy counselor Ritzkel told me of this himself and then he added the first month. I always said so he can make his scientific discourses as palpitatingly interesting as a French novelist his novels 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 papers published by the Reyniska Museum. Still this particular discourse is important seeing that it practically contains the program of many other subsequent essays. I must however emphasize this fact here that neither Homer and classical philology nor the birth of tragedy represents a beginning in my brother's career. It is really surprising to see how very soon he actually began grappling with the questions which were to prove the problems of his life. If a beginning to his intellectual development be sought at all then it must be traced to the years 1865 to 67 in Leipzig. The birth of tragedy his maiden attempt at book writing with which he began his 28th year is the last link about long chain of developments and the first fruit that was a long time coming to maturity. Nietzsche's was a polyphonic nature in which the most different and apparently most antagonistic talents had come together. Philosophy, art and science in the form of philology then each certainly possessed a part of him the most wonderful feature perhaps it might even be called the real Nietzschean feature. Of this versatile creature was the fact that no eternal strife resulted from the juxtaposition of these inimical traits that not one of them strove to dislodge or to get the upper hand of the others. When Nietzsche announced the musical career in order to devote himself to philology and gave himself up to the most strenuous study he did not find it essential completely to suppress his other tendencies. As before he continued both to compose and derive pleasure from music and even studied counterpoint somewhat seriously. Moreover during his years at Leipzig when he consciously gave himself up to philological research he began to engross himself in Schopenhauer and was thereby won by philosophy forever. Everything that could find room took up its abode in him and these juxtaposed factors far from interfering with one another's existence were rather mutually fertilizing and stimulating. All those who have read the first volume of that biography with attention must have been struck with the perfect way in which the various impulses in his nature combined in the end to form one general term and how this flowed with ever greater force in the direction of a single goal. Thus science art and philosophy developed and became ever more closely related in him until in the birth of tragedy they brought forth a centaur. That is to say a work which would have been an impossible achievement to a man with only a single special talent. This polyphony of different talents all coming to utterance together and producing the richest and boldest of harmonies is the fundamental feature not only Nietzsche's early days but of his whole development. It is once again the artist, philosopher and man of science who as one man in later years after many wanderings recantations and revolutions of feelings produces that other and rare centaur of highest rank Zarathustra. The birth of tragedy requires perhaps a little explaining more particularly as we have now ceased to use either Schopenhauerian or Wagnerian terms of expression. And it was for this reason that five years after its appearance my brother wrote an introduction to it in which he very plainly expresses his doubts concerning the views it contains in the manner in which they are presented. The kernel of its thought he always recognized as perfectly correct and all he deployed in later days was that he had spoiled the grand problem of Hellenism as he understood it by adulterating it with ingredients taken from the world of most modern ideas. As time went on he grew ever more and more anxious to define the deep meaning of this book with greater precision and clearness, a very good elucidation of its aims, which unfortunately was never published appears among his notes of the year 1886 and is as follows. Concerning the birth of tragedy, a book consisting of mere experiences relating to pleasurable and unpleasurable aesthetic states with a metaphysical artistic background. At the same time the confession of a romanticist, the sufferer feels the deepest longing for beauty, he begets it finally a product of youth full of youthful courage and melancholy. Fundamental psychological experiences, the word apolloni, stands for that state of rapt reposed in the presence of a visionary world in the presence of the world of beautiful appearance designed as a deliverance from becoming. The word Dionysus on the other hand stands for its generous becoming grown self conscious in the form of that rampant voluptuousness of the creator who is also perfectly conscious of the violent anger of the destroyer. The antagonism of these two attitudes and the desires that underlie them, the first named would have the vision it conjures up eternal. In its light man must be quite ascent apathetic, peaceful, healed and on friendly terms with himself and all existence. The second strives after creation, after the voluptuousness of willful creation that is constructing and destroying. Creation felt and explained as an instinct would be merely the unremitting inventive action of a dissatisfied being overflowing with wealth and living at high tension and high pressure of a God who would overcome the sorrows of existence by means only of continual changes and transformations. Appearance as a transient and momentary deliverance, the world as an apparent sequence of godlike visions and deliverances. This metaphysical artistic attitude is opposed to Schopenhauer's one-sided view, which values are not from the artist's standpoint but from the spectators because it brings salvation and deliverance by means of a joy produced by unreal as opposed to the existing or the real. The experience only of him who is suffering and is in despair owing to himself and everything existing. Deliverance in the form and its eternity just as Plato may have pictured it, save that he rejoiced in a complete subordination of all to excitable sensibilities even in the idea itself. To this as opposed the second point of view, art regarded as a phenomenon of the artist above all of the musician, the torture of being obliged to create as a Dionysian instinct. Tragic art rich in both attitudes represents the reconciliation of Apollo and Dionysus. Appearance is given the greatest importance by Dionysus and yet it will be denied and cheerfully denied. This is directed against Schopenhauer's teaching of resignation as the tragic attitude towards the world. Against Wagner's theory that music is a means and drama and end, a desire for tragic myth or religion and even pessimistic religion as horror forcing frame and rip certain plants flourish. This trust of science, although it's definitely soothing optimism be strongly felt the serenity of the theoretical man. Deep antagonism to Christianity, why the degeneration of a dramatic spirit is ascribed to its influence. Any justification of the world can only be an aesthetic one profound suspicions about morality is part and parcel of the world of appearance. The happiness of existence is only possible as the happiness derived from appearance being is a fiction invented by those who suffer from becoming happiness and becoming is possible only in the annihilation of the real of the existing of the beautifully visionary and the pessimistic dissipation of illusions with the annihilation of the most beautiful phenomena in the world of appearance. Dionysian happiness reaches its zenith. The birth of tragedy is really only a portion of a much greater work on Hellenism which my brother had always had in view from the time of his student days, but even the portion it represents was originally designed upon a much larger scale than the present one. The reason probably being that Nietzsche desired only to be of service to Wagner. When a certain portion of the projected work on Hellenism was ready and have received the title Greek cheerfulness, my brother happened to call upon Wagner at tribution in April 1871 and found him very low spirited in regard to the mission of his life. My brother was very anxious to take some decisive step to help him in laying the plans of his great work on Greece aside. He selected a small portion from the already completed manuscript, a portion dealing with one distinct side of Hellenism to which its tragic art he then associated Wagner's music with it and the name Dionysus and thus took the first step towards that world historical view through which we have since grown accustomed to regard Wagner. 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 aesthetic 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. Elizabeth First of Nietzsche, Weimar, September 1905. In our introduction, preface of the birth of tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche, this LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Preface, an attempt at self-criticism, one. Whatever may lie at the bottom of this doubtful book must be a question of the first rank and attractiveness moreover a deeply personal question. Improved thereof observed the time in which it originated, in spite of which it originated, the exciting period of the Franco-German War of 1870-71. While the thunder of the battle of worth rolled over Europe, the ruminator and riddle lover, who had to be the parent of this book, sat somewhere in a nook of the Alps lost in riddles and ruminations, consequently very much concerned and unconcerned at the same time, and wrote down his meditations on the Greeks. The kernel of the curious and almost inaccessible book to which this belated prologue or epilogue is to be devoted. A few weeks later, and he found himself under the walls of bets still wrestling with the notes of interrogation, he had set down concerning the alleged cheerfulness of the Greeks and of Greek art. Till it last, in that month of deep suspense, when peace was debated at Versailles, he too attained to peace with himself, and slowly recovering from a disease brought home from the field, He made up his mind definitely regarding the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music, from music, music and tragedy, Greeks and tragic music, Greeks and the artwork of pessimism, and in well-fashioned, beautiful, and life-inspiring, like no other race, hitherto the Greeks indeed, the Greeks were in need of tragedy, yea of art, wherefore Greek art. We can thus guess where the great note of interrogation concerning the value of existence had been set. Is pessimism necessarily the sign of decline, of decay, of failure, of exhausted and weakened instincts, as was the case with the Indians, as is to all appearance the case with us modern men and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of strength, an intellectual predilection for what is hard, awful, evil, problematical in existence, owing to well-being, to exuberant health, to fullness of existence? Is there perhaps suffering in overfulness itself, a seductive fortitude with the keenest of glances which yearns for the terrible as for the enemy, the worthy enemy with whom it may try in strength, from whom it is willing to learn what fear is, what means tragic myth to the Greeks of the best, strongest, bravest era, and the prodigious phenomenon of the Dionysian, and that which was born there of tragedy, and again that of which tragedy died, the Socratesm of morality, the dialectics, contentedness and cheerfulness of the theoretical man, indeed, might not this very Socratesm be a sign of decline, of weariness, of disease, of anarchically disintegrating instincts, and the Hellenic cheerfulness of the later Hellenism merely a glowing sunset. The Epicurean will counter to pessimism merely a precaution of the sufferer, and science itself, our science, I viewed as a symptom of life, what really signifies all science. Whither were still wents all science? Well, is scientism perhaps only fear and evasion of pessimism, a subtle defense against truth, morally speaking something like falsehood and cowardice, and un morally speaking an artifice? Oh Socrates, Socrates, was this perhaps thy secret? Oh mysterious ironist, was this perhaps thine ironing? Two. What I then laid hands on, something terrible and dangerous, a problem with horns, not necessarily a bull itself, but at all events a new problem. I should say today it was the problem of science itself. Science conceived for the first time as problematic, as questionable, but the book in which my youthful ardor and suspicion then discharge themselves, what an impossible book must needs grow out of a task so disagreeable to youth, constructed of not but precocious, unripened self experiences, all of which lay close to the threshold of the communicable, based on the groundwork of art, for the problem of science cannot be discerned on the groundwork of science, a book perhaps for artists with collateral analytical and retrospective aptitudes, that is an exceptional kind of artists for whom one must seek and does not even care to see, full of psychological innovations and artists secrets with an artist's metaphysics in the background, a work of youth full of youths metal and youths melancholy independent defiantly self sufficient, even when it seems to bow to some authority and self veneration, in short a firstling work, even in every bad sense of the term, in spite of its senile problem affected with every fault of youth, above all with youth's prolexity and youth's storm and stress, on the other hand in view of the success it had, especially with the great artist to whom it addressed itself, as it were, in a dual log, Richard Wagner, a demonstrated book, I mean a book which at any rate, sufficed for the best of its time, on this account if for no other reason it should be treated with some consideration and reserve. Yet I shall not altogether conceal how disagreeable it now appears to me, how after 16 years it stands a total stranger before me, before an I which is more mature and 100 times more fastidious but which has by no means grown colder, nor lost any of its interest in that self same task, essayed for the first time by this daring book, to view science through the optics of the artist, and art moreover through the optics of life. Three, I say again, today it is an impossible book to me, I call it badly written, heavy, painful, image anglin, an image entangling, modlin, sugared at times even to feminism, uneven in tempo, void of the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore rising above the necessity of demonstration, distrust for even of the propriety of demonstration as being a book for initiates, as music for those who are baptized with the name of music, who are united from the beginning of things by common ties of rare experiences in art as a counter sign for blood relations in Artibus. A hardy and fantastic book which from the very first withdraws even more from the profanum vulgis of the culture than from the people, but which also as its effect has shown and still shows, knows very well how to seek fellow enthusiasts and lure them to new byways and dancing grounds, here at any rate thus much was acknowledged with curiosity as well as with aversion. A strange voice spoke, the disciple of a still unknown god who for the time being had hidden himself under the hood of a scholar under the Germans gravity and disinclination for dialectics even under the bad manners of the Wagnerian. Here was a spirit with strange and still nameless needs, a memory bristling with questions, experiences and obscurities beside which stood the name Dionysus like one more note of interrogation. Here spoke people said to themselves with misgivings something like a mystic and almost menatic soul which undecided whether it should disclose or conceal itself, stammers with an effort and capriciously as in a strange tongue. It should have sung this new soul and not spoken. What a pity that I did not dare to say what I had been had to say as a poet. I could have done so perhaps or at least as a philologist for even at the present day. Well, not everything in this domain remains to be discovered and disinterred by the philologist above all the problem that here there is a problem before us. And that so long as we have no answer to the question, what is Dionysian? The Greeks are now as ever wholly unknown and inconceivable. For I what is Dionysian in this book may be found an answer, a knowing one speaks here, the votary and disciple of his God. Perhaps I should now speak more guardedly and less eloquently of a psychological question so difficult as the origin of tragedy among the Greeks. A fundamental question is the relation of the Greek to pain is degree of sensibility. Did this relation remain constant? Or did it veer about the question whether his ever increasing longing for beauty for festivals, gayities, new cults did really grow out of want, privation, melancholy, pain? For suppose even this to be true and paraclies or usidities intimates as much in the great funeral speech. Once then the opposite longing, which appeared first in the order of time, the longing for the ugly, the good, resolute desire of the old Helene for pessimism for tragic myth for the picture of all that is terrible, evil, enigmatic, destructive, fatal at the basis of existence. Once then must tragedy have sprung, perhaps from joy, from strength, from exuberant health, from over fullness, and what then physiologically speaking is the meaning of that madness out of which comic as well as tragic art has grown. The Dionysian madness, what? Perhaps madness is not necessarily the symptom of degeneration, of decline, of the late culture. Perhaps there are a question for aliness, neuroses of health, of folk youth and youthfulness. What does that synthesis of God and goat in the Seder point to? What self-experience, what stress made the Greek think of the Dionysian reveler and primitive man as a Seder? And as regards the origin of the tragic chorus, perhaps there were endemic ecstasies in the eras when the Greek body bloomed and the Greek soul brimmed over with life. Visions and hallucinations which took hold of entire communities, entire cult assemblies. What if the Greeks in the very wealth of their youth had the will to be tragic and were pessimist? What if it was madness itself to use a word of plateaus, which brought the greatest blessings upon hellers? And what if, on the other hand, and conversely, at the very time of their dissolution and weakness, the Greeks became always more optimistic, more superficial, more histrionic, also more ardent for logic and the largest sizing of the world, consequently at the same time more cheerful and more scientific? I, despite all modern ideas and prejudices of the democratic taste, may not the triumph of optimism, the common sense that has gained the upper hand, the practical and theoretical utilitarianism, like democracy itself, with which it is synchronous, be symptomatic of declining bigger, of approaching age, of physiological weariness, and not at all pessimism. It is very ambiguous and optimist because a sufferer, we see, it is a whole bundle of weighty questions which this book has taken upon itself. Let us not fail to add its weightiest question, viewed through the optics of life. What is the meaning of morality? Five, already in the foreword to Richard Wagner, art and not morality, is set down as the properly metaphysical activity of man. In the book itself, the precant proposition occurs time and again that the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Indeed, the entire book recognizes only an artist's thought and artist's afterthought behind all occurrences, a God, if you will, but certainly only an altogether thoughtless and unmoral artist God, who, in construction, as in destruction, in good as in evil, desires to become conscious of his own equitable joy and sovereign glory, who, in creating worlds, frees himself from the anguish of fullness and over fullness, from the suffering of the contradictions concentrated within him. The world that is the redemption of God attained at every moment as the perpetually changing, perpetually new vision of the most suffering, most antithetical, most contradictory being, who contrives to redeem himself only in appearance. This entire artist's metaphysics, call it arbitrary, idle, fantastic, if you will, the point is that it already betrays a spirit which is determined someday that all hasers to make a stand against the moral interpretation and significance of life. Here, perhaps for the first time, a pessimism beyond good and evil announces itself here that perverseness of disposition obtains expression and formulation against which Schopenhauer never grew tired of hurling beforehand his angriest implications and thunderbolts, a philosophy which dares to put, derogatorily put, morality itself in the world of phenomena and not only among phenomena in the sense of the idealistic, terminus technicus, but among the illusions as appearance, semblance, error, interpretation, accommodation, art. Perhaps the depth of this anti-moral tendency may be best estimated from the guarded and hostile silence with which Christianity is treated throughout this book. Christianity has been the most extravagant burlesque of the moral theme to which mankind has hitherto been obliged to listen. In fact, to the purely aesthetic world interpretation and justification taught in this book, there is no greater antithesis than the Christian dogma which is only and will be only moral and which with its absolute standards, for instance, its truthfulness of God, relegates, that is, disowns, convicts, condemns, art, all art, to the realm of falsehood. Behind such a mode of thought and valuation, which, if at all genuine, must be hostile to art, I always experienced what was hostile to life, the wrathful, vindictive counter-will to life itself, for all life rests on appearance, art, delusion, optics, necessity of perspective and error. From the very first Christianity was, essentially and thoroughly, the nausea and surfeit of life for life, which only disguised, concealed and decked itself out under the belief in another or better life, the hatred of the world, the curse on the affections, the fear of beauty and sensuality, another world invented for the purpose of slandering this world, the more, at bottom, a longing for. Nothingness for the end, for rest, for the Sabbath of Sabbaths, all this as also the unconditional will of Christianity to recognize only moral values has always appeared to me as the most dangerous and ominous of all possible forms of a will to perish, at the least as the symptom of a most fatal disease of profoundest weariness, despondency, exhaustion, impoverishment of life. For before the tribunal of morality, especially Christian, that is unconditional morality, life must constantly and inevitably be the loser because life is something essentially un-moral, indeed oppressed with the weight of contempt and the everlasting know, life must finally be regarded as unworthy of desire as in itself unworthy. Morality itself what? May not morality be a will to disown life, a secret instinct for annihilation, a principle of decay, of depreciation, of slander, a beginning of the end, and consequently the danger of dangers. It was against morality, therefore, that my instinct as an inter-cessory instinct for life turned in this questionable book, inventing for itself a fundamental counter-dogma and counter-evaluation of life, purely artistic, purely anti-Christian, what should I call it? As a philologist, I am a man of words, I baptized it not without some liberty for who could be sure of the proper name of the Antichrist with the name of a Greek god, I called it Dionysian. 6. You see which problem I ventured to touch upon in this early work, how I now regret that I have not been 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 labored to express in Kantian and Schopenhauerian formulae, strange and new valuations which land fundamentally counter to the spirit of Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as to their taste. 7. What for suit were Schopenhauer's views on tragedy? What gives, he says, in Velvals villa und Verstellung, to 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 and this consists the tragic spirit. 8. It therefore leads to resignation. Oh, how differently Dionysia spoke to me. Oh, how far from me then was just this entire resignationism, but there is something far worse in this book which I now regret even more than having obscured and spoiled Dionysian anticipations with Schopenhauerian formulae to it that in general I spoiled. 9. The grand Hellenic problem as it had opened up before me by the admixture of the most modern things, but I entertained hopes where nothing was to be hoped for, where everything pointed all too clearly to an approaching and that on the basis of our latter day German music, I began to fable about the spirit of to tenism. 10. As if it were on the point of discovering and returning to itself, I at the very time that the German spirit which not so very long before had had the will to the lordship over Europe, the strength to lead and govern Europe testamentarily and conclusively resigned and under the pompous pretense of empire founding, affected its transition to mediocratization, democracy, and modern ideas. In very fact, I have since learned to regard the spirit of to tenism as something to be disbared of and unsparingly treated as also a present German music which is romanticism through and through in the most un-Greek and of all possible forms of art. 11. And now over a first rate nerve destroyer, doubly dangerous for a people given to drinking and revering the unclear as a virtue, namely in its twofold capacity of an intoxicating and stupefying narcotic. 12. Of course, apart from all precipitous hopes and faulty applications to matters especially modern, with which I then sport my first book, the great Dionysian note of interrogation as set down therein continues standing on and on, even with reference to music, how must we conceive of a music which is no longer of romantic origin, like the German, but of Dionysian. 7. But my dear sir, if your book is not romanticism, what in the world is, can the deep hatred of the present, of reality and modern ideas be pushed farther than has been done in your artist's metaphysics, which would rather believe in nothing or in the devil than in the now, 8. Does not a radical base of wrath and annihilated pleasure growl on beneath all your contrapuntal vocal art and oral 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, 9. Rather, let nothing be true, than that you should be in the right, than that your truth should prevail. 10. Fear yourself, my dear sir pessimist, and art theifier, with ever so unlocked ears, a single select passage of your own book, that not in eloquent dragon slayer passage which may sound insidiously rat-charming to young ears and hearts. 11. What is not that the true blue romanticist confession of 1830 under the mask of the pessimism of 1850, after which, of course, the usual romanticist finale at once strikes up, rupture, collapse, return, and prostration before an old belief before the old God. 12. What is not your pessimist book itself a piece of anti-hellenism and romanticism, something equally intoxicating and befogging and narcotic at all events, I, a piece of music, of German music, but listen, let us imagine a rising generation with this undauntedness of vision with this heroic impulse towards the prodigious. 13. Let us imagine the bold step of these dragon slayers, the proud daring with which they turn their backs on all the effeminate doctrines of optimism in order to live resolutely in the whole, and in the full, would it not be necessary for the tragic man of this culture, with his self-discipline to earnestness and terror, to desire a new art, the art of metaphysical comfort, tragedy as the Helena belonging to him, and that he should exclaim with fouls, und solid ich nicht sind süchtigstir gewalt, ins Leben sie und die existe gestalt, would it not be necessary, no, thrice, no, ye young romanticists, it would not be necessary, but it is very probable that things may end thus, that ye may end thus namely comforted as it is written in spite of all self-discipline to earnestness and terror, metaphysically comforted in short as romanticists are at want to end. As Christians, no ye should first of all learn the art of earthly comfort, ye should learn to laugh, my young friends, if ye are at all determined to remain pessimists, if so, ye will perhaps, as laughing ones eventually send all metaphysical comfortism to the devil, and metaphysics, first of all, or to say it in the language of that Dionysian ogre, call Zarathustra, 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. This crown of the laughter, this rose-gallon crown, I myself have put on this crown, I myself have consecrated my laughter, no one else have I found today strong enough for this. Zarathustra, the dancer, Zarathustra, the light, one who beckoned with his pinions, one ready for flight, beckoning unto all birds, ready and prepared, a blissfully light-spirited one. Zarathustra, the sooth-sayer, Zarathustra, the sooth-laffer, no impatient one, no absolute one, one who loveth leaps, and side leaps, I myself have put on this crown, this crown of the laughter, this rose-gallon crown, to you, my brethren, do I cast this crown, laughing have I consecrated ye highermen, learn I pray you to laugh. Thus spate Zarathustra, 73, 17, 18, and 20, Sils Maria, Oberredin Gadjen, August 1886, and shall not I, by mightiest desire, in living shape that so fair form acquire, swanwick translation of Faust. In the preface, Chapter 1 of the Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche, this LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 1 and forward to Richard Wagner, 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 aesthetic publicity, and to be able also to write the introductory remarks with the same contemplative delight, the impress of rich as the petrification of good and elevating hours. It bears in every page, I form a conception of the moment when you, my highly honored friend, will receive this essay. How you, say after an evening walk in the winter snow, will behold the unbound Prometheus on the tidal 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. You will thus remember that it was at the same time as your magnificent dissertation on Beethoven originated these amidst the horrors and sublimities of the war which had just then broken out that I collected myself for these thoughts. But those persons would err to whom this collection suggests no more perhaps than the antithesis of patriotic excitement and aesthetic revelry of gallant earnestness and sportive delight. Upon a real perusal of this essay, such readers will rather to their surprise discover how earnest is the German problem we have to deal with, which we properly place as a vortex and turning point in the very midst of German hopes. Perhaps, however, this same class of readers will be shocked at seeing an aesthetic problem taken so seriously, especially if they can recognize in art no more than a merry diversion, a readily dispensable court gesture to the earnestness of existence, as if no one were aware of the real meaning of this confrontation with the earnestness of existence. These earnest ones may be informed, but I am convinced that art is the highest task and the properly metaphysical activity of this light as it is understood by the man to whom as my sublime protagonist on this path I would now dedicate this essay. Basel, end of the year 1871. The birth of tragedy, one. We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics when once we have perceived not only by logical inference, but by the immediate certainty of intuition that the continuous development of art is bound up with the duplexity of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, in like manner as procreation is dependent on the duality of the sexes involving perpetual conflicts with only periodically intervening reconciliations. These names we borrow from the Greeks, who disclose to the intelligent observer the profound mysteries of their view of art. Not indeed in concepts, but in the impressively clear figures of their world of deities. It is in connection with Apollo and Dionysus, the two art deities of the Greeks, that we learned that there existed in the Grecian world a wide antithesis in origin and aims between the art of the Shaper, the Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of music that of Dionysus. Both these so heterogeneous tendencies run parallel to each other for the most part openly at variance and continually inciting each other to new and more powerful birds to perpetuate in them the strife of this antithesis which is but seemingly bridged over by their mutual term art. Till at last by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic will they appear paired with each other and through this pairing eventually generate the equally Dionysian and Apollonian artwork of Attic tragedy. In order to bring these two tendencies within closer range, let us conceive them first of all as the separate art worlds of dreamland and drunkenness between which physiological phenomena, a contrast may be observed analogous to that existing between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. In dreams according to the conception of Lucretius, the glorious divine figures first appeared to the souls of men. In dreams the great Shaper beheld the charming corporeal structure of superhuman beings, and the Hellenic poet, if consulted on the mysteries of poetic inspiration, would likewise have suggested dreams and would have offered an explanation resembling that of Hans Socks as the master singers. Mein fründe das gerade ist Diktors Werk, dass er sein Traum in doubt nicht merkt. Glaube mir das Menschen wahrster wann, wird ihm im Trauma aufgatten. All die Kunst und Poetry ist nix als Vartraum der Traum. The beauty is appearance of the dream worlds and the production of which every man is a perfect artist is the presupposition of all plastic art and in fact as we shall see of an important half of poetry also. We take delight in the immediate apprehension of form. All forms speak to us. There is nothing indifferent. Nothing superfluous. But together with the highest life of this dream reality, we also have glimmering through it the sensation of its appearance. Such at least as my experience as to the frequency I, normality of which I could adduce many proofs as also the sayings of the poets. Indeed the man of philosophic turn has a foreboding that underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed and that therefore it is also an appearance that Schopenhauer actually designates the gift of occasionally regarding men and things as mere phantoms and dream pictures as the criterion of philosophical ability. Accordingly the man susceptible to art stands in the same relation to the reality of dreams as the philosopher to the reality of existence. He is a close and willing observer for from these pictures he reads the meaning of life and by these processes he trains himself for life. And it is perhaps not only the agreeable and friendly pictures that he realizes in himself with such perfect understanding. The earnest, the troubled, the dreary, the gloomy, the sudden checks, the tricks of fortune, the uneasy presentiments, in short the whole divine comedy of life. And the Inferno also passed before him not merely like pictures on the wall for he too lives and suffers in these scenes and yet not without that fleeting sensation of appearance. And perhaps many a one will like myself recollect having sometimes called out cheeringly and not without success amid the dangers and terrors of dream life. It is a dream I will dream on. I've likewise been told a person's capable of continuing the causality of one and the same dream for three and even more successive nights. All of which facts clearly testify that our innermost being the common substratum of all of us experiences our dreams with deep joy and cheerful acquiescence. This cheerful acquiescence and the dream experience has likewise been embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo. For Apollo as the God of all shaping energies is also the sooth saying God. He who as the etymology of the name indicates is the shining one, the deity of light also rules over the fair appearance of the inner world of fantasies. The higher truth or perfection of these states in contrast to the only partially intelligible everyday world. I, the deep consciousness of nature, healing and helping and sleep and dream is at the same time the symbolical analog of the faculty of sooth saying and in general of the arts through which life is made possible and worth living. But also that delicate line which the dream picture must not over a step, lest it act pathologically in which case appearance, being reality pure and simple would impose upon us, must not be wanting in the picture of Apollo. That measured limitation, that freedom from the wilder emotions, that philosophical calmness of the sculptor God. His eye must be sun-like according to his origin even when it is angry and looks displeased, the sacredness of his beauteous appearance is still there. And so we might apply to Apollo in an eccentric sense what Schopenhauer says of the man wrapped in the veil of Maya, Veldt asked Villaunt Verstelang, one page 416. Just as in a stormy sea, unbounded in every direction, rising and falling with howling mountainous waves, a sailor sits in a boat and trusts in his frail bark. So in the midst of a world of sorrows, the individual sits quietly supported by and trusting in his principium in the weird Jew Atonis. Indeed we might say of Apollo that in him the unshaken faith in this principium and the quiet sitting of the man wrapped therein have received their sublimest expression. And we might even designate Apollo as the glorious divine image of the principium in the weird Jew Atonis from out of the gestures and looks of which all the joy and wisdom of appearance together with his beauty speak to us. In the same work Schopenhauer has described to us the stupendous awe which seizes upon man when of a sudden he is at a loss to account for the cognitive forms of a phenomenon in that the principle of reason in some one of its manifestations seems to admit of an exception. After this awe the blissful ecstasy which rises from the innermost depths of man, eye of nature, at this same collapse of the principium in the weird Jew Atonis and we shall gain an insight into the being of the Dionysian which is brought within close as can perhaps by the analogy of drunkenness. It is either under the influence of the narcotic draft of which the hymns of all primitive men and peoples tell us or by the powerful approach of spring penetrating all nature with joy that those Dionysian emotions awake in the augmentation of which the subjective vanishes to complete self-forgiveness. So also in the German Middle Ages singing and dancing crowds ever increasing in number were born from place to place under the same Dionysian power. In these St. John's and St. Vitus's dancers we again perceive the bachi courses of the Greeks with their previous history in Asia Minor as far back as Babylon and the Orgiastic Sea. There are some who from lack of experience or obtuseness will turn away from such phenomena as folk diseases with a smile of contempt or pity prompted by the consciousness of their own health. Of course the poor wretches do not divine what a cadaverous looking and ghastly aspect. This very health of theirs presents when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers rushes past them. Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the covenant between man and man again established but also estranged, hostile or subjugated nature again celebrates her reconciliation with her lost son, man. Of her own accord earth proffers her gifts and peacefully the beasts of prey approach from the desert and the rocks. The jariot of Dionysus is bedecked with flowers and garlands, panthers and tigers passed beneath his yoke, changed Beethoven's jubilee song into a painting. And if your imagination be equal to the occasion when the awe struck me and sink into the dust it will then be able to approach the Dionysian. Now as the slave of free man, now all the stubborn, hostile barriers which necessity caprice or shameless fashion has set up between man and man are broken down. Now at the evangel of cosmic harmony each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, blended with his neighbor but as one with him as if the veil of my has been torn and we're now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious primordial unity. In song and in dance man exhibits himself as a member of a higher community he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the point of taking a dancing flight into the air. His gestures bespeak enchantment even as the animals now talking as the earth yields milk and honey so also something supernatural sounds forth from him. He feels himself a god he himself now walks about enchanted and elated even as the gods whom he saw walking about in his dreams man is no longer an artist he has become a work of art. The artistic power of all nature here reveals itself in the tremors of drunkenness to the highest gratification of the primordial unity. The noblest clay, the costliest marble, namely man, is here needed in cut and the chisel strokes of the Dionysian world artist are accompanied with a cry of the E. Lucenian mysteries. Er stirts neither Malonen, anest du den chauffeur belt. My friend, justice is poet's task, his dreams to read and to unmask. Trust me illusions through the thrice sealed in dream to man will be revealed. All verse craft and poetization is but soothed dream interpretation. Compare world and will as idea, line 455 following translated by Haldane and Kemp. To bow in the dust of millions thy maker mortal dust divine. Compare shallers him to joy and Beethoven ninth symphony. End of chapter one. Chapter two of the birth of tragedy by Fredrish Nietzsche. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Chapter two. Thus far we have considered the Apollonian and his antithesis the Dionysian as artistic powers which burst forth from nature herself. Without the mediation of the human artist and in which her art impulses are satisfied in the most immediate and direct way. First, as the pictorial world of dreams, the perfection of which has no connection whatever with the intellectual height or artistic culture of the unit man. And again, as drunk in reality, which likewise does not heed the unit man, but even seeks to destroy the individual and redeem him by a mystic feeling of oneness. And then these immediate art states of nature, every artist is either an imitator to it, either an Apollonian, an artist in dreams or a Dionysian, an artist in ecstasies. Or finally, as for instance in Greek tragedy, an artist in both dreams and ecstasies. So we may perhaps picture him as in his Dionysian drunkenness and mystical self abnegation. He is so lonesome and apart from the reveling choruses he sinks down and how now through Apollonian dream inspiration his own state that is his oneness with the primal source of the universe reveals itself to him in a symbolical dream picture. After these general premises and contrastings, let us now approach the Greeks in order to learn in what degree and to what height these art impulses of nature were developed in them. Whereby we shall be enabled to understand and appreciate more deeply the relation of the Greek artist to his archetypes or according to the Aristotelian expression, the imitation of nature. In spite of all the dream literature and the numerous dream anecdotes of the Greeks, we can speak only conjecturally, though with a fair degree of certainty of their dreams. Considering the incredibly precise and unearing plastic power of their eyes as also their manifest and sincere delight in colors, we can hardly refrain to the shame of everyone born later from assuming for their very dreams a logical causality of lines and contours, colors and groups, a sequence of scenes resembling their best release, the perfection of which would certainly justify us if our comparison were possible in designating the dreaming Greeks as homers and Homer as a dreaming Greek in a deeper sense than when modern man in respect to his dreams ventures to compare himself with Shakespeare. On the other hand, we should not have to speak conjecturally if asked to disclose the immense gap which separated the Dionysian Greek from the Dionysian barbarian. From all quarters of the ancient world to say nothing of the modern, from Rome as far as Babylon we can prove the existence of Dionysian festivals, the type of which bears at best the same relation to the Greek festivals as the bearded satyr who borrowed his name and attributes from the goat does to Dionysus himself. In nearly every instance, the center of these festivals lay in extravagant sexual licentiousness, the ways of which overwhelmed all family life and its vulnerable traditions. The very wildest beasts of nature were let loose here, including that detestable mixture of lust and cruelty, which has always seemed to me the genuine witches draught. For some time, however, it would seem that the Greeks were perfectly secure and guarded against the feverish agitations of these festivals, the knowledge of which entered Greece by all the channels of land and sea by the figure of Apollo himself rising here in full pride who could not have held out the Gorgon's head to a more dangerous power than this grotesquely uncouth Dionysian. It is in Doric art that this majestically rejecting attitude of Apollo perpetuated itself. This opposition became more precarious and even impossible when from out of the deepest root of the Hellenic nature similar impulses finally broke forth and made way for themselves. The Delphi god by a seasonably affected reconciliation was now contented with taking the destructive arms from the hands of his powerful antagonist. This reconciliation marks the most important moment in the history of the Greek cult, wherever we turn our eyes we may observe the revolutions resulting from this event. It was the reconciliation of two antagonists with the sharp demarcation of the boundary lines to be thus forth observed by each and with periodical transmission of testimonials. In reality, the chasm was not bridged over. But if we observe how under the pressure of this conclusion of peace, the Dionysian power manifested itself, we shall now recognize in the Dionysian orgies of the Greeks as compared with the Babylonian Saecia and their retroaggression of man to the tiger and the ape, the significance of festivals of world redemption and days of transfiguration. Not till then does nature attain her artistic jubilee. Not till then does the rupture of the Principium in the Riju Arteonis become an artistic phenomenon. That horrible witch's draft of sensuality and cruelty was here powerless. Only the curious blending and duality in the emotions of the Dionysian revelers reminds one of it just as medicines remind one of deadly poisons. That phenomenon to it that pains beget joy that jubilation rings painful sounds out of the breast. From the highest joy sounds the cry of horror or the yearning wail over an irretrievable loss. In these Greek festivals a sentimental trait as it were breaks forth from nature as if she must sigh over her dismemberment into individuals. The song and pantomime of such duly minded revelers was something new and unheard of in the Homeric Grecian world and the Dionysian music in particular excited awe and horror. If music as it would seem was previously known as an Apollonian art it was strictly speaking only as the wave beat of rhythm. The formative power of which was developed to the representation of Apollonian conditions. The music of Apollo was Doric architectonics and tones but in merely suggested tones such as those of the Scythera. The very element which forms the essence of Dionysian music and hence of music in general is carefully excluded as un-Apollonian namely the thrilling power of the tone. The uniform stream of the mellows and the thoroughly incomparable world of harmony. In the Dionysian Dithyram man is incited to the highest exaltation of all his symbolic faculties, something never before experienced. Struggles for utterance, the annihilation of the veil of Maya, oneness as genius of the raised eye of nature. The essence of nature is now to be expressed symbolically. A new world of symbols is required for once the entire symbolism of the body. Not only the symbolism of the lips, face and speech but the whole pantomime of dancing which sets all the members into a rhythmical motion. There upon the other symbolic powers, those of music and rhythmics, dynamics and harmony suddenly become impetuous. To comprehend this collective discharge of all the symbolic powers, a man must have already attained that height of self-abnegation which wills to express itself symbolically through these powers. The Dithyramic Votery of Dionysus is therefore understood only by those like himself. With what astonishment must the Apollonian Greek have behold him? With an astonishment which was all the greater, the more it was mingled with the shuttering suspicion that all this was in reality not so very foreign to him. Yea, that liken to a veil is Apollonian consciousness only hid this Dionysian world from his view. End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of the Birth of Tragedy by Fredridge Nietzsche This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 3 In order to comprehend this we must take down the artistic structure of the Apollonian culture as it were, stone by stone, till we behold the foundations on which it rests. Here we observe, first of all, the glorious Olympian figures of the gods, standing on the gables of this structure, whose deeds, represented in far shining reliefs, adorn its freezes. Though Apollo stands among them as an individual deity, side by side with others and without claim to priority of rank, we must not suffer this fact to mislead us. The same impulse which embodied itself in Apollo has in general given birth to this whole Olympian world, and in this sense we may regard Apollo as the father thereof. What was the enormous need from which proceeded such an illustrious group of Olympian beings, whosoever with another religion in his heart approaches these Olympians and seeks among them for moral elevation, even for sanctity, for incorporeal spiritualization, for sympathetic looks of love, will soon be obliged to turn his back on them, discouraged and disappointed. Here nothing suggests asceticism, spirituality or duty. Here only an exuberant, even triumphant life speaks to us in which everything existing is deified, whether good or bad. And so the spectator will perhaps stand quite bewildered before this fantastic exuberance of life and ask himself what magic potion these madly merry men could have used for enjoying life so that wherever they turned their eyes, Helena, the ideal image of their own existence, floating in sweet sensuality, smiled upon them. But to this spectator already turning backwards we must call out. Depart not hence but here rather what Greek folk wisdom says of this same life which with such inexplicable cheerfulness spreads out before thee. There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Salinas, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When at last he fell into his hands, the king asked what was best of all and most desirable for man. Fixed in immovable, the demon remained silent. Till at last, forced by the king, he broke out with shrill laughter into these words. O wretched race of a day, children of chance and misery, why do ye compel me to say to you what it were most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is forever beyond your reach, not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. The second best for you, however, is soon to die. How is the Olympian world of deities related to this folk wisdom even as the rapturous vision of the tortured martyr to his sufferings? 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 green birth of the Olympian world between himself and them. The excessive distrust of the titanic powers of nature, the Moira throning inexorably over all knowledge, the vulture of the great philanthropist Prometheus, the terrible fate of the wise Oedipus, the family curse of the Atradee which drove the resties to matricide, in short that entire philosophy of the Sylvan God with its mythical exemplars which wrought the ruin of the melancholy, Etruscans was again and again surmounted anew by the Greeks through the artistic middle world of the Olympians or at least veiled and withdrawn from sight. To be able to live, the Greeks had from dire necessity to create these gods which process we may perhaps picture to ourselves in this manner that out of the original Titan thearchy of terror, the Olympian thearchy of joy was evolved by slow transitions through the Apollonian impulse to beauty even as roses break forth from thorny bushes. How else could this so sensitive people, so vehement in its desire, so singularly qualified for sufferings, have endured existence if it had not been exhibited to them in their gods surrounded with a higher glory? The same impulse which calls art into being as the compliment and consummation of existence seducing to a continuation of life caused also the Olympian world to arise in which the Hellenic will held up before itself a transfiguring mirror. Thus do the gods justify the life of man in that they themselves live it the only satisfactory theodicy. Existence under the bright sunshine of such gods is regarded as that which is desirable in itself and the real grief of the Homeric men has reference to parting from it especially to early parting so that we might now say of them with a reversion of the Salenian wisdom that to die early is worst of all for them. The second worst is some day to die at all. If once the lamentation is heard it will ring out again of the short-lived achilles of the leaf-like change and vicissitude of the human race of the decay of the heroic age. It is not unworthy of the greatest hero to long for a continuation of life, I even as a day laborer. So vehemently does the will at the Apollonian stage of development long for this existence so completely at one does the Homeric man feel himself with it that the very lamentation becomes its song of praise. Here we must observe that this harmony which is so eagerly contemplated by modern man in fact this oneness of man with nature to express which Schiller introduced the technical term naive is by no means such as simple naturally resulting and as it were inevitable condition which must be found at the gate of every culture leading to a paradise of man. This could be believed only by an age which sought to picture to itself Rousse Aimeel also as an artist and imagined it had found in Homer such an artist Aimeel reared at nature's bosom. Wherever we meet with the naive in art it behooves us to recognize the highest effect of the Apollonian culture which in the first place has always to overthrow some titanic empire and slave monsters and rich through powerful dazzling representations and pleasurable illusions must have triumphed over a terrible depth of world contemplation and the most keen susceptibility to suffering. But how seldom is the naive that complete absorption in the beauty of appearance attained and hence how inexpressibly sublime is Homer who as unit being bears the same relation to this Apollonian folk culture as the unit dream artist does to the dream faculty of the people and the nature in general. The Homeric naive take can be comprehended only as the complete triumph of the Apollonian illusion. It is the same kind of illusion as nature so frequently employs to compass her ends. The true goal is veiled by our phantasm. We stretch out our hands for the latter while nature attains the former through our illusion. In the Greeks the will desired to contemplate itself in the transfiguration of the genius and the world of art in order to glorify themselves. Its creatures had to feel themselves worthy of glory. They had to behold themselves again in a higher sphere without this consummate world of contemplation acting as an imperative or reproach such as the sphere of beauty in which as in a mirror they saw their images the Olympians with this mirroring of beauty the Hellenic will combat its talent correlative to the artistic for suffering and for the wisdom of suffering and as a monument of its victory Homer the naive artist stands before us. End of Chapter 3 Chapter 4 of the Birth of Tragedy by Fredric Nietzsche This LibriVox recording is in the public domain Chapter 4 Concerning this naive artist the analogy of dreams will enlighten us to some extent when we realize to ourselves the dreamer as in the midst of the illusion of the dream world and without disturbing it he calls out to himself it is a dream I will dream on when we must advance and for a deep inner joy in dream contemplation when on the other hand to be at all able to dream with this inner joy in contemplation we must have completely forgotten the day and its terrible uptrustiveness we may under the direction of the dream reading Apollo interpret all these phenomena to ourselves somewhat as follows though it is certain that of the two halves of life the waking and the dreaming the former appeals to us as by far the more preferred important excellent and worthy of being lived indeed as that which alone is lived yet with reference to that mysterious ground of our being of which we are the phenomenon should paradoxical as it may seem be inclined to maintain the very opposite estimate of the value of dream life for the more clearly I perceive in nature those all powerful art impulses and in them a fervent longing for appearance for redemption through appearance the more I feel myself driven to the metaphysical assumption that the very only existent and primordial unity as the eternally suffering and self-contradictory requires the rapture's vision the joyful appearance for his continuous salvation which appearance we who are completely wrapped in it and composed of it must regard as the verily non-existent that is as a perpetual unfolding in time space and causality in other words as empiric reality if we therefore waive the consideration of our own reality for the present if we conceive our empiric existence and that of the world generally as the representation of the primordial unity generated every moment we shall then have to regard the dream as an appearance of the parents hence as a still higher gratification of the primordial desire for the parents it is for this same reason that the innermost heart of nature experiences that indescribable joy in the naive artist and in the naive work of art which is likewise only an appearance of appearance in a symbolic painting Raphael himself one of these immortal naive ones has represented to us this the potentiating of appearance to appearance the primordial process of the naive artist and at the same time of Apollonian culture in his transfiguration the lower half with the possessed boy the despairing bearers the helpless terrified disciples shows to us the reflection of eternal primordial pain the sole basis of the world the appearance here is the counter appearance of eternal contradiction the father of things out of this appearance then arises like an ambrosial vapor a vision like new world of appearances of which those wrapped in that first appearance see nothing a radiant floating in purest bliss and painless contemplation beaming from wide open eyes here there is presented to our view in the highest symbolism of art that Apollonian world of beauty and its substratum the terrible wisdom of salinus and we comprehend by intuition their necessary interdependence Apollo however again appears to us as the apotheosis of the principium in the widu ationis in which alone the perpetually attained end of the primordial unity its redemption through appearance is consummated he shows us with sublime attitudes of the entire world of torment is necessary that thereby the individual may be impaled to realize the redeeming vision and then sunk in contemplation thereof quietly sit in his fluctuating bark in the midst of the sea this apotheosis of individuation if it be at all conceived as imperative and laying down precepts knows but one law of the individual that is the observance of the boundaries of the individual measure in the Hellenic sense Apollo as ethical deity demands due proportion of his disciples and that this may be observed he demands self-knowledge and thus parallel to the aesthetic necessity for beauty there run the demands know thyself and not too much well presumption and undoness are regarded as the truly hostile demons of the non-Apollonian sphere hence as characteristics of the pre-apollonian age that of the titans and of the extra-apollonian world that of the barbarians because of his titan-like love for man Prometheus had to be torn to pieces by vultures because of his excessive wisdom which saw the middle of the sinks Oedipus had to plunge into a bewildering vortex of monstrous crimes thus did the Delphic God interpret the Grecian past so also the effects brought by the Dionysian appeared titanic and barbaric to the Apollonian Greek but at the same time he could not conceal from himself that he too was inwardly related to these overthrown titans and heroes indeed he had to recognize still more than this his entire existence with all its beauty and moderation rested on a hidden substratum of suffering and of knowledge which was again disclosed to him by the Dionysian and though Apollo could not live without Dionysus the titanic and the barbaric were in the end not less necessary than the Apollonian and now let us imagine to ourselves how the ecstatic tone of the Dionysian festival sounded in ever more luring and the witching strains into this artificially confined world built on appearance and moderation how in these strains all the undueness of nature in joy sorrow and knowledge even to the transpiercing shriek became audible let us ask ourselves what meaning could be attached to the somatizing artist of Apollo with the phantom harp sound as compared with this demonic folk song the muses of the arts of appearance pale before an art which in its intoxication spoke the truth the wisdom of silence cried woe, woe against the cheerful Olympians the individual with all his boundaries and due proportions went under in the self oblivion of the Dionysian states and forgot the Apollonian precepts the undueness revealed itself as true contradiction, the bliss born of pain declared itself but of the heart of nature and thus wherever the Dionysian prevailed the Apollonian was routed and annihilated but it is quite a certain that where the first assault was successfully bestowed the authority and majesty of the Delphi god exhibited itself as more rigid and menacing than ever for I can only explain to myself the Doric state and Doric art as a permanent war camp of the Apollonian only by incessant opposition to the titanic barbaric nature of the Dionysian was it possible for an art so defiantly prim so encompassed with bulwarks a training so warlike and rigorous a constitution so cruel and relentless to last for any length of time up to this point we have enlarged upon the observation made at the beginning of this essay how the Dionysian and the Apollonian in ever new births succeeding and mutually augmenting one another so the Hellenic genius how from out the age of bronze with its titan struggles and rigorous folk philosophy the Homeric world develops under the fostering sway of the Apollonian impulse to beauty how this naive splendor is again overwhelmed by the in bursting flood of the Dionysian and how against this new power the Apollonian rises to the austere majesty of Doric art and the Doric view of things if then in this way in the strife of these two hostile principles the older Hellenic history falls into four great periods of art we are now driven to inquire after the ulterior purpose of these unfoldings and processes unless perchance we should regard the last attained period the period of Doric art as the end and aim of these artistic impulses and here the sublime and highly celebrated artwork of Attic tragedy and dramatic Dithiran presents itself to our view as the common goal of both these impulses whose mysterious union after many and long precursory struggles found its glorious consummation in such a child which is at once Antigone and Cassandra end of chapter 4