Friedrich Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy

The Birth of Tragedy (henceforth BT) was Friedrich Nietzsches first book. The first edition, published on 2 January 1872, had as its full title The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, as did the second, very slightly revised edition of 1874. When he reissued it in 1886, Nietzsche renamed it The Birth of Tragedy. Or: Greekhood and Pessimism. New Edition with an Attempt at a Self-Criticism. The impact of its first publication was very considerable, though not, for the most part, in the way that Nietzsche could have hoped. Certainly its dedicatee, Richard Wagner, was thrilled by it, and wrote to Nietzsche: I have never read anything more beautiful than your book!, and Wagners wife Cosima followed up with: You have summoned spirits in this book which I believed were only forthcoming at the behest of our Master. Those reactions, and similar ones from Nietzsches Wagnerian friends, were not surprising, in the light of the contents, especially of the later stretches of the work. But academic opinion was outraged, as was only to be expected, though it seems that Nietzsche had not anticipated it. An old enemy from his schooldays, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, fired an initial salvo in May with the title Philology of the Future! A Reply to Friedrich Nietzsches Birth of Tragedy, a piece of abusive academic polemic remarkable even by the standards that prevail in the world of scholarship. Nietzsche didnt reply himself, but his close friend Erwin Rohde weighed in with a rejoinder in the form of an open letter to Wagner, called Afterphilologie!, a difficult word to translate: it means, roughly, Pseudo-Philology, but After is also the German for arse, and there is a long tradition, not perhaps altogether unexpectedly stemming from Luther, of using the word in both senses simultaneously. Wagner, too, joined in the fight; and Wilamowitz continued the undignified squabble. Like all such battles, the outcome was indecisive, except that there was no doubt that Nietzsche had done himself a great deal of harm in professional circles, at the same time as he had decisively launched himself on the cultural scene.

As we shall see, when he came to write his Attempt at a Self-Criticism in 1886, Nietzsche was far harsher on the book than any of his academic critics had been, their grounds for disapproval being only one element in the many-pronged critique he directs against the work. So what we now have is a bewildering whole, if we see it as that: the main body of the book is angrily denounced in the Attempt, at the same time as he tries to perform a rescue operation, claiming that in certain respects this impossible book contains insights which he muddied by introducing jarring and incongruous elements, but which show that in certain crucial respects he was already on the main path of his lifes work. It is, of course, a familiar tactic with authors looking with mixed feelings on their earliest productions, but in this case, more than usually, it presents questions about the nature of self-interpretation and development. What I shall do, in the first place, is to concentrate on the first edition, since that presents quite enough problems in itself, and then go on to deal with aspects of the Attempt which are genuinely enlightening about what Nietzsche originally said, as opposed to what he later wished that he had said.

What kind of book is BT? That turns out to be so hard to answer that some commentators on it have concluded that it is sui generis, never a helpful category to invoke, since it provides one with no criteria for judging it by. The shortest answer is that, for all its brevity, it is a work which is attempting to do many things more or less simultaneously. The opening of the book proper is We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics, suggesting that what we are going to be offered, in line with the title, is a treatise on art, specifically on Greek tragedy. On the other hand, in the Preface to Richard Wagner, he refers to the seriously German problem that we are dealing with, a vortex and turning point at the very centre of German hopes, and also to his conviction that art is the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life. So it would seem, and what follows bears this out, that Nietzsche has three major concerns (at least) going in tandem: a political-cultural one, a claim to be worked out about the nature of metaphysics, and a consideration of a specific phenomenon in the history of art. These were always to be central issues in his work, but what marks off