The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music ( German: Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik ) is an aesthetic treatise in which Friedrich Nietzsche outlined his view of the dualistic origins of art. The first edition was published in 1872. In 1886, the treatise was republished with the preface "The Experience of Self-Criticism" and the subtitle "Hellenism and Pessimism".
Overview of The Birth of Tragedy
(the overview is followed by a summary by chapters and main themes)
Nietzsche believed that the ancient Greeks found in art an antidote to the meaninglessness of reality and this hopeless pessimism generated by this realization. In ancient Greek art, Nietzsche sees a constant struggle between two principles, or types of aesthetic experience, which he calls Apollonian and Dionysian. Nietzsche argues with the entire German aesthetic tradition, which optimistically interpreted ancient Greek art as having at its core an Apollonian, bright beginning. He speaks for the first time about another Greece - a tragic, intoxicated mythology, Dionysian , and draws parallels with the fate of Europe.
The Apollonian beginning, according to Nietzsche, is order, harmony, calm artistry and gives rise to plastic arts (architecture, sculpture, painting, graphics), the Dionysian beginning is drunkenness, oblivion, chaos, ecstatic dissolution of identity in the mass, giving rise to non-plastic art (above all music ). The Apollonian principle opposes the Dionysian principle as an artificial one opposes the natural, condemning everything that is excessive, disproportionate. Nevertheless, these two principles are inseparable from each other, always work together. They fight, according to Nietzsche, in the artist, and both are always present in any work of art.
