THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY: SONGS OF VICTORY AND DEFEAT

When I came to men for the first time, then did I commit the hermit's folly, the great folly: I appeared in the market-place.

And when I spoke to all, I spoke to none. In the evening, however, rope-dancers were my companions, and corpses; and I myself almost a corpse.

With the new morning, however, there came to me a new truth: Then did I learn to say "Of what account to me are market-place and crowd and crowd-noise and long crowd-ears!"

You higher men, learn this from me: In the market-place no one believes in higher men. But if you will speak there, very well! The crowd, however, sputters "We are all equal."

"You higher men," -- so sputters the crowd -- "there are no higher men, we are all equal; man is man, before God -- we are all equal!"

Before God! -- Now, however, this God has died. Before the crowd, however, we will not be equal. You higher men, go away from the market-place!

Ye higher men, the worst thing in you is that ye have none of you learned to dance as ye ought to dance—to dance beyond yourselves! What doth it matter that ye have failed!

How many things are still possible! So learn to laugh beyond yourselves! Lift up your hearts, ye good dancers, high! higher! And do not forget the good laughter!

This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown: to you, my brethren, do I cast this crown! Laughing have I consecrated; ye higher men, learn, I pray you—to laugh!

(Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Higher Man’, Thus Spake Zarathustra)

Nietzsche’s account of the origins of Greek tragedy, the Birth of Tragedy was published 2 January 1872 in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War. In his ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’ within BT, Nietzsche reminisced that he felt the very pang of battle as he battled his own contradictions and penned his thoughts ‘in the field’ of chaos and uncertainty.  

Surrendering, as Nietzsche does with Schiller before him, to the musical mood, I feel in my bones a parallel with the substratum of events in modern Greece. Against the backdrop of the Parthenon, we can imagine Nietzsche admiring the contrast in the foreground of full-blooded protest and visceral pessimism from men and the markets. Nietzsche, after all, preferred the lyrical audacity and flightiness of Archilochus to the steady prose of Homer and his sagacious mind for epic.

Hence in BT, we distinguish two modes, or moods and moments of change: the Apollinian and Dionysiac. The optimism of ‘theoretical man’, Nietzsche attributes to the cool, sun-centred worship of Apollo; the Deity inspires happy order and rational reflection. Epitomised by the Doric style in architecture, the Apollinian mode is Schiller’s ‘frozen music’, which freezes the Parthenon and the European Central Bank atop its pillars. The Dionysiac spirit, contrarily, is characterised by Dionysus/Bacchus' savage will for mischief and laughter. He leads the maenads in revelry with his thyrsos, or pine cone, the symbol of natural regeneration and destruction.

Dionysus, in particular, instantiates the chaotic destruction which Joseph Schumpeter considered to be endemic with capitalism.

According to Nietzsche in his Introduction to BT:

We will have achieved much for scientific study of aesthetics when we come, not merely to a logical understanding, but also to the certain and immediate apprehension of the fact that the further development of art is bound up with the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, just as reproduction similarly depends upon the duality of the sexes, their continuing strife and only periodically occurring reconciliation. We take these names from the Greeks, who gave a clear voice to the profound secret teachings of their contemplative art, not in ideas, but in the powerfully clear forms of their divine world. With those two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we establish our recognition that in the Greek world there exists a huge contrast, in origin and purposes, between the visual arts, the Apollonian, and the non-visual art of music, the Dionysian.* These two very different drives go hand in hand, for the most part in open conflict with each other and simultaneously provoking each other all the time to new and more powerful offspring, in order to perpetuate in them the contest of that opposition, which the common word “Art” only seems to bridge, until at last, through a marvellous metaphysical act of the Greek “will,” they appear paired up with each other and, as this pair, finally produce Attic tragedy, as much a Dionysian as an Apollonian work of art.

In order to bring those two drives closer to us, let us think of them first as the separate artistic worlds of dream and of intoxication, physiological phenomena between which we can observe an opposition corresponding to the one between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.  According to the idea of Lucretius, the marvellous divine shapes first stepped out before the mind of man in a dream.* It was in a dream that the great artist saw the delightful anatomy of superhuman existence, and the Greek poet, questioned about the secrets of poetic creativity, would have also recalled his dreams and given an explanation similar to the one Hans Sachs provides in Die Meistersinger.*

‘My friend, that is precisely the poet’s work—

To figure out his dreams, mark them down.

Believe me, the truest illusion of mankind

Is revealed to him in dreams:

All poetic art and poeticizing

Is nothing but interpreting true dreams’.

In keeping with the essential musical dreaming behind nature, Nietzsche discerns a profound joy and melody beneath the works of Beethoven and Wagner. The market, our own markets in illusions, one might say, craft the harmony supporting our artistic striving, our work in artibus. The European structure, today, with its treaties and mosaic of conventions and sources of funding are the stabilising ballast of deeper aspirations. If I were to reproach the ECB and commission in Dionysian language, I would say, as Nietzsche does of Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’, that the technocrats have mistaken the essence of pastoralism for the ever-transposed ‘scenes’ of pastoral life, ‘the countryside’, ‘the peasants’. Inflation targeting, is not alone, or even essentially, stability.

Nietzsche, moreover, was no utilitarian. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Schiller - various as these Titans are - agree that the true artist seeks, and mediates the underlying Will of his time. He is urged, not prompted, by enveloping chaos as by the spirit of change.

With our “modern” tendencies, regrettably, Nietzsche laments that we have lost the shock, the terror of chaos, of the ‘witches’ brew’ of socio-political disorder which paves the way for new life. As in Greece and now Italy, we – the markets and the globe in train – are leading a satyr’s dance toward new financial and social structures. Nietzsche would cry, all to the good!

From the Attempt at Self-Criticism:

One can guess from all this just where the great question mark about the worth of existence was placed. Is pessimism necessarily the sign of collapse, destruction, of disaster, of the exhausted and enfeebled instincts—as it was with the Indians, as it is now, to all appearances, among us, the “modern” peoples and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual inclination for what in existence is hard, dreadful, evil, problematic, emerging from what is healthy, from overflowing well being, from living existence to the full? Is there perhaps a way of suffering from the very fullness of life? A tempting courage of the keenest sight which demands what is terrible as the enemy, the worthy enemy, against which it can test its power, from which it wants to learn what “to fear” means? What does the tragic myth mean precisely for the Greeks of the best, strongest, and bravest age? What about that tremendous phenomenon of the Dionysian?* And what about what was born out of the Dionysian—the tragedy? And by contrast, what are we to make of what killed tragedy—Socratic morality, dialectic, the satisfaction and serenity of the theoretical man?* How about that?  Could not this very Socratism [Sokratismus] be a sign of collapse, exhaustion, sickness, the anarchic dissolution of the instincts? And could the “Greek serenity” of later Greek periods be only a red sunset? Could the Epicurean will hostile to pessimism be merely the prudence of a suffering man?* And even science itself, our science —indeed, what does all science in general mean considered as a symptom of life? What is the point of all that science and, even more serious, where did it come from? What about that? Is scientific scholarship perhaps only a fear and an excuse in the face of pessimism? A delicate self-defence against—the Truth? And speaking morally, something like cowardice and falsehood? Speaking unmorally, a clever trick?* O Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? O you secretive ironist, was that perhaps your—irony?—

For, underneath the horrifying, the terrible, the novel, lies a sense of Primal Oneness. And that, perhaps, would be Nietzsche’s final consolation and gift of wisdom to the Greek republic. Revel in your own pessimism, your solitary doubts to find and reach a higher order beyond the Doric simplicity of the current European experiment. Then, in our jubilation, we will have rent asunder the veil of Maya, the Indic curtain of illusion that separates us from further, and more profound illusions. Though Nietzsche abhorred mediocre demagogic thought, it is thus instructive – maybe ironic - that his archetypal tragedy, Oresteia ends with Apollo instituting democracy among the Athenian citizenry.

Between the plastic art of the Apolline and the musical/tragic art of the Dionysiac, Nietzsche emphatically favoured the latter. Indeed, Nietzsche and the ‘barbaric’ Titans of yet-to-be conceived spiritual and material, even marketable forms would claim in chorus with Faust: ‘Should not my longing overleap the distance And draw the fairest form into existence?’ [From Goethe's Faust, II, 7438-9.]

In closing Nietzsche would rather eulogise a long-view, beyond mere politics. Long for a cosmopolitan Europe, truly unified..