Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Nietzsche and the influences on The Birth of Tragedy
- 2 Apollo and Dionysos in dialectic (§§1–6)
- 3 The tragic moment (§§7–10)
- 4 The decline and death of Greek tragedy (§§11–15)
- 5 Modernity and the rebirth of tragedy (§§16–25)
- 6 Appraising The Birth of Tragedy: Nietzsche in his later writings
- Nietzsche's life and works
- Further reading
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Appraising The Birth of Tragedy: Nietzsche in his later writings
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Nietzsche and the influences on The Birth of Tragedy
- 2 Apollo and Dionysos in dialectic (§§1–6)
- 3 The tragic moment (§§7–10)
- 4 The decline and death of Greek tragedy (§§11–15)
- 5 Modernity and the rebirth of tragedy (§§16–25)
- 6 Appraising The Birth of Tragedy: Nietzsche in his later writings
- Nietzsche's life and works
- Further reading
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I find it an impossible book today. I declare that it is badly written, clumsy, embarrassing, with a rage for imagery and confused in its imagery, emotional to the point of effeminacy, uneven in pace, lacking the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore too arrogant to prove its assertions, mistrustful even of the propriety of proving things, a book for the initiated.
(ASC, 6)A tremendous hope speaks out of this writing. I have in the end no reason whatever to renounce the hope for a dionysian future of music.
(EH, 51)At the beginning of this book I described The Birth of Tragedy as somewhat of an enigma, as an entanglement of philosophical themes and tensions that resist a straightforward interpretation and categorization. In this regard I proposed that The Birth of Tragedy was something of a philosophical chameleon, an odd animal whose elusiveness means that its true colour still remains to be seen, but whose intent may well be to maintain its camouflage. We have seen that Nietzsche's lively prose and audacious theses are often imbued with paradoxes and contradictions: for instance Schopenhauer is regarded as a “hero” and referenced throughout the text, yet the affirmation of existence fundamental to the Greek experience of tragedy is entirely at odds with Schopenhauer's philosophy; Nietzsche entangles modernity with antiquity to the point that only a careful reading can relieve the text from a crippling charge of circularity; and, to take a final example, it is a book that ultimately favours an aesthetic engagement with philosophy and life, and casts aside the theoretical paradigm of Socrates and Plato – yet only by the text itself walking a razor-thin line between philosophy and art.
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- Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy , pp. 167 - 208Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2013