This is not the place to offer sustained criticisms of his theses; but to stimulate reflection I suggest that Nietzsche is blatantly unfair not to Socrates but to Euripides—and that the death of tragedy was far better explained by Goethe, when he said to Eckermann, May 1, 1825:

“Man is simple. And however rich, manifold, and unfathomable he may be, yet the circle of his states is soon run through. If the circumstances had been like those among us poor Germans where Lessing wrote two or three, I myself three or four, and Schiller five or six passable plays, there would have been room for a fourth, fifth, and sixth tragic poet. But among the Greeks with their abundant production, where each of the three great ones had written over one hundred, or close to one hundred, plays, and the tragic subjects of Homer and the heroic tradition had in some cases been treated three or four times—in view of such an abundance, I say, one may suppose that subject matter and contents had gradually been exhausted and poets writing after the three great ones did not really know what next. And when you stop to think about it, why should they? Wasn’t it really enough for a while? … After all, these few grandiose views that have come down to us are of such dimension and significance that we poor Europeans have been occupying ourselves with them for centuries and will yet have food and work enough for a few more centuries.”

Unfortunately, The Birth of Tragedy does not end with Section 15, as an early draft did and as the book clearly ought to. Another ten sections follow that weaken the whole book immeasurably.

Sections 1 through 6 are introductory and inferior stylistically. The heart of he book is found in Sections 7 through 15, which deal with the birth and death of tragedy. This is by far the best part of the book and can probably be understood fairly well by itself. Sections 16-25 are less worthy of Nietzsche than anything else of comparable length he ever published—and he himself soon felt this. The book as a whole, though it has a touch of genius, is marred by the faults Nietzsche enumerates in his “Attempt at a Self-Criticism.” This “Attempt,” however, shows us not only a brilliant writer who has grown far beyond the level of his first performance, but a great human being.

W. K.

1Berlin, Gebrüder Bornträger, 1872.
2For Ritschl’s letter, see The Portable Nietzsche (ed. and tr. by Walter Kaufmann).
3Leipzig, E. W. Fritzsch, 1872.
4Libeler.
5Zukunftsphilologie: Zweites Stück (Berlin, Gebrüder Bornträger, 1873).
6Johannes Dräseke, “Beiträge zur Wagner-Frage” (contributions to the problem of Wagner), in Musikalisches Wochenblatt, IV (1873).
7Bruno Meyer (Nietzsche wrote “Meier”), “Beiträge zur Wagner-Frage: In eigener Sache” (in my cause), in Deutsche Warte, V, 641-73. Dräseke replied in Musikalisches Wochenblatt, V (1874), 403-05, 418-20, and 438-442, condemning Meyer’s attack on Nietzsche.
8Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1965.
9Apollinisch has often been rendered by “Apollonian;” but I follow Brinton, Morgan, and the translator of Spengler’s Decline of the West in preferring “Apollinian”: after all, Nietzsche did not say Apollonisch.
10This is the title of the first chapter of Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869). The text itself was originally presented as Arnold’s last Oxford lecture, June 15, 1867, under the title “Culture and Its Enemies.”
11Compare also Nietzsche’s early fragment “Homer’s Contest” (pp. 32-39 in Portable Nietzsche).
12Berkeley, University of California Press, 1951; Boston, Beacon Press paperback, 1951.
13Leipzig, Dürr, 1904.
14Leipzig, Armanen, 1935.
15Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, section 251, note 27; also Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, check the references to Richard Oehler in the Index.
16Knight’s Some Aspects of the Life and Work of Nietzsche and particularly of His Connection with Greek Literature and Thought (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1933) is generally unreliable, and some of the many errors in the book are pointed out in Kaufmann’s Nietzsche. In other words, the two monographs devoted to Nietzsche and the Greeks (Oehler’s and Knight’s) are both quite unhelpful.
17Erich Podach, Nietzsches Werke des Zusammenbruchs (Heidelberg, Wolfgang Rothe Verlag, 1961). Cf. Kaufmann, “Nietzsche in the Light of His Suppressed Manuscripts,” Journal of the History of Philosophy (1964), note 13.
18All the relevant passages are considered in Chapter 13 of Kaufmann’s Nietzsche.

The
BIRTH OF TRAGEDY
Or:
Hellenism And Pessimism



by

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE



New Edition
With an Attempt at a Self-Criticism1

Attempt at a Self-Criticism

Whatever may be at the bottom of this questionable book, it must have been an exceptionally significant and fascinating question, and deeply personal at that: the time in which it was written, in spite of which it was written, bears witness to that—the exciting time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. As the thunder of the battle of Wörth was rolling over Europe, the muser and riddlefriend who was to be the father of this book sat somewhere in an Alpine nook, very bemused and beriddled, hence very concerned and yet unconcerned, and wrote down his thoughts about the Greeks—the core of the strange and almost inaccessible book to which this belated preface (or postscript) shall now be added. A few weeks later—and he himself was to be found under the walls of Metz, still wedded to the question marks that he had placed after the alleged “cheerfulness” of the Greeks and of Greek art. Eventually, in that month of profoundest suspense when the peace treaty was being debated at Versailles, he, too, attained peace with himself and, slowly convalescing from an illness contracted at the front, completed the final draft of The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music.—Out of music? Music and tragedy? Greeks and the music of tragedy? Greeks and the art form of pessimism? The best turned out, most beautiful, most envied type of humanity to date, those most apt to seduce us to life, the Greeks—how now? They of all people should have needed tragedy? Even more—art? For what—Greek art?

You will guess where the big question mark concerning the value of existence had thus been raised. Is pessimism necessarily a sign of decline, decay, degeneration, weary and weak instincts—as it once was in India and now is, to all appearances, among us, “modern” men and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual predilection for the hard, gruesome, evil, problematic aspect of existence, prompted by well-being, by overflowing health, by the fullness of existence? Is it perhaps possible to suffer precisely from overfullness? The sharp-eyed courage that tempts and attempts, that craves the frightful as the enemy, the worthy enemy, against whom one can test one’s strength? From whom one can learn what it means “to be frightened”? What is the significance of the tragic myth among the Greeks of the best, the strongest, the most courageous period? And the tremendous phenomenon of the Dionysian—and, born from it, tragedy—what might they signify?— And again: that of which tragedy died, the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, frugality, and cheerfulness of the theoretical man—how now? might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of weariness, of infection, of the anarchical dissolution of the instincts? And the “Greek cheerfulness” of the later Greeks—merely the afterglow of the sunset? The Epicureans’ resolve against pessimism—a mere precaution of the afflicted? And science itself, our science—indeed, what is the significance of all science, viewed as a symptom of life? For what—worse yet, whence—all science? How now? Is the resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from, pessimism? A subtle last resort against—truth? And, morally speaking, a sort of cowardice and falseness? Amorally speaking, a ruse? O Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? O enigmatic ironist, was that perhaps your—irony?

2

What I then got hold of, something frightful and dangerous, a problem with horns but not necessarily a bull, in any case a new problem—today I should say that it was the problem of science itself, science considered for the first time as problematic, as questionable. But the book in which my youthful courage and suspicion found an outlet—what an impossible book had to result from a task so uncongenial to youth! Constructed from a lot of immature, overgreen personal experiences, all of them close to the limits of communication, presented in the context of art—for the problem of science cannot be recognized in the context of science—a book perhaps for artists who also have an analytic and retrospective penchant (in other words, an exceptional type of artist for whom one might have to look far and wide and really would not care to look); a book full of psychological innovations and artists’ secrets, with an artists’ metaphysics in the background; a youthful work full of the intrepid mood of youth, the moodiness of youth, independent, defiantly self-reliant even where it seems to bow before an authority and personal reverence; in sum, a first book, also in every bad sense of that label. In spite of the problem which seems congenial to old age, the book is marked by every defect of youth, with its “length in excess” and its “storm and stress.” On the other hand, considering its success (especially with the great artist to whom it addressed itself as in a dialogue, Richard Wagner), it is a proven book, I mean one that in any case satisfied “the best minds of the time.”1 In view of that, it really ought to be treated with some consideration and taciturnity. Still, I do not want to suppress entirely how disagreeable it now seems to me, how strange it appears now, after sixteen years—before a much older, a hundred times more demanding, but by no means colder eye which has not become a stranger to the task which this audacious book dared to tackle for the first time: to look at science in the perspective of the artist, but at art in that of life.

3

To say it once more: today I find it an impossible book: I consider it badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, in places saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof, mistrustful even of the propriety of proof, a book for initiates, “music” for those dedicated to music, those who are closely related to begin with on the basis of common and rare aesthetic experiences, “music” meant as a sign of recognition for close relatives in artibus2—an arrogant and rhapsodic book that sought to exclude right from the beginning the profanum vulgus3 of “the educated” even more than “the mass” or “folk.” Still, the effect of the book proved and proves that it had a knack for seeking out fellow-rhapsodizers and for luring them on to new secret paths and dancing places. What found expression here was anyway—this was admitted with as much curiosity as antipathy—a strange voice, the disciple of a still “unknown God,” one who concealed himself for the time being under the scholar’s hood, under the gravity and dialectical ill humor of the German, even under the bad manners of the Wagnerian.