The Birth of Tragedy - 1 - The Apolline and the Dionysiac
Part One
Quote
The most accomplished, most beautiful, most universally envied race of mankind, those most capable of seducing us into life — [the Greeks] were the ones who needed tragedy? Or even more — art? What for?
Notes
🔥 Nietzsche begins the second edition of The Birth of Tragedy with a kind of preface called "An Attempt at Self-Criticism." He seems mystified by his book and by the fact that it finds readers who are interested in it.
🔥 He draws a correlation between the height of tragedy with the height of the Greeks, and with the decline of tragedy with their decline, and wonders if tragedy was a healthy way of integrating madness.
🔥 He also leads to questions about morality and sees it as anti-life. Life is amoral, so morality is anti-life. Christianity, in particular, is a perpetrator of this, inventing an idealized world in heaven so they can deny and despise this life. Therefore, he says, this instinct for life and art are against morality and Christianity, even going so far as to call it the Anti-Christ, but also the Dionysiac. That's all just in the "Attempt at Self-Criticism."
🔥 Getting into the beginning of the book, Nietzsche sets up a duality between the "Apolline" and the "Dionysiac" in the world of art. The Apolline is about beauty, form, and order, while the Dionysiac is about madness and ecstasy. He stresses the importance of perceiving art not through logical reasoning, but through direct perception of what's there.
🔥 The dream world is the precondition of all art. The artist is a dream interpreter who reacts to what he sees in dreams. Dreams reveal a deeper reality than waking reality.
🔥 Apollo and Dionysus, and their aspects, work together in the creation of art. Apollo is the deification of individuation, defined by "the maintenance of boundaries", moderation and self-knowledge. "Know thyself" and "Nothing in excess". Whereas Dionysus says excess is truth and aims for self-oblivion and primal oneness. Greek tragedy brought these two together in union.
🔥 Music is a huge part of this, too. It's the closest layer to the dream world, not mediated by language or images. The poetic ideas come out of the "musical mood", which is the real prime material of art and the experience of art.
🔥 "The Dionysiac musical enchantment of the sleeping man now sends out sparks of images, lyric poems which, at the peak of their evolution, will bear the name of tragedies and dramatic dithyrambs."
🔥 Art is not about the individual will. The artist is a medium through which art is channeled and expressed.
🔥 "Only in so far as the genius is fused with the primal artist of the world in the act of artistic creation does he know anything of the eternal essence of art; for in that state he is wonderfully similar to the weird fairy-tale image of the creature that can turn its eyes around and look at itself; now he is at once subject and object, at once poet, actor and audience."
🔥 Lyric poetry cannot express anything that is not already present within the music it emerges out of. Therefore, language "can never uncover the innermost core of music."