Now I knew pretty early on that I wanted to take philosophy classes during college. I had been a philosophy nut from pretty early on, stemming out on my interest in religion but continuing beyond that. I ended up minoring in the philosophy of art, but I didn't choose that until I read this work by Friedrich Nietzsche.
Something about it spoke to my soul, I felt as though he was articulating something that I could feel intimately but was incapable of putting into words. It was the same sort of feeling that I got when I read "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" for the first time. Honestly I think most of my journey through reading is just looking for that feeling to hit once again.
This was also how I fell in love with Nietzsche in general. For those who don't know anything about his life, he essentially studied classics and the history of Ancient Greece until he wrote this book. And then "The Birth of Tragedy" drops and it has very little to do with actual history, it's mostly speculative, and talks a lot about German art and where it is going. So after that he was mostly seen as a philosopher who was also kind of an artsy guy. He was friends with Wagner and wrote music and poetry on the side (if I remember correctly Wagner never cared for his musical compositions haha). He had a break with Wagner after hearing his Ring cycle and reacting in a way that I think can be summed up as: WHAT ON EARTH WAS THAT (which is what a normal person should say in response to the Ring cycle). Eventually he died after seeing someone beat a horse in the middle of the street and throwing himself on the horse to save it. After that he went completely mad and died soon after. After his death his sister tried to take all of his works and make them more Nazi-like, but I think that idea has mostly died out now.
I've always kind of seen Nietzsche as this ultimate idealist. He died protecting a horse for starters. And his split with Wagner has always seemed "death of innocence" like to me. But that's probably me projecting. Point is that I like Nietzsche as a person (besides the fact that he hated women, which is why this post is only about "The Birth of Tragedy").
So to get into the actual work, this is about how in Ancient Greece there were two forces at play in art. There's the Apollonian which is very stately art, usually takes the form of poetry or statues. And there's the Dionysian, which is a drunken revelry of alcohol and food and orgies that cause you to lose your individuality and lose yourself in the masses. Unsurprisingly he elaborates more on the Dionysian because that is much more interesting. The idea is that the Dionysian man has seen into the very reality of the world, and in order to cope with it, he has to partake in these celebrations of mortality or be lost to despair.
The ultimate culmination of these two art forms together was in Ancient Greek tragedies. But this was not to last. Because then plays started popping up that reveled in individual suffering and killed the way that the Dionysian erased the individual. He talks smack about these plays for a very long time.
But there's hope, Nietszche believes, because German music and German culture will soon rise again. He believes that Wagner is the man to do this, and his book stops there. But we all know that in the end Wagner does no such thing, at least to Nietszche, so it is a bittersweet ending.
As you can imagine, there is plenty more in the book about the Dionysian man and Nietzsche's thoughts on music in general. I would highly encourage checking it out, it is wonderfully written and communicates some very important ideas, in my opinion.
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