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Title: The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche ISBN: 0-486-28515-4 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 June, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $2.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.58 (26 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: The origin of tragedy
Comment: Nietzsche's attempt to trace the roots of the greatest works of art: how the Dioynisean impulse, with its corollaries of intoxication, excess, self-destruction and bacchanalian joy, is combined with the Appolline, which is characterised by harmony, restraint, form and is a sort of "dream" of beauty. Nietzsche explains that great art is created through Apollo's harnessing of Dionysos, or, in other words, through reason subordinating the animal in man. The book is a splendid display of erudition and helps us to understand the extent of Nietzsche's admiration of the Greeks. One of his key formulations is how tragedy enabled the Greeks to nevertheless see life, in spite of the suffering entailed in it, as indestructibly powerful and joyous. Art for them was a veil, a means of escaping the melancholy and Hamlet-like loathing of world, which accompanies all knowledge. In his attempt to define tragedy, one can see that Nietzsche was still indebted, in his conceptual approach, to the metaphysics of his master, Schopenhauer, even though the book was intended as a break from Schopenhauer. The decadence of Greek tragedy, Nietzsche argues, occured with the advent of Euripides and Socratic rationalism. Instead of the merging of Apollo and Dionysos, tragedy became characterised by superficiality, optimism and rationalistic, paradoxical thought. It began to encourage a narrow, utilitarian view of life. It is only music, in Nietzsche's opinion, that has the potential of being purely Dionysean, and, in this, he makes an excursus onto his mentor and friend at the time, Richard Wagner. He champions Wagner (to whom his book is dedicated) as a wonderfully Dionysean artist, whose music would succeed in ennobling the German people by making them great through suffering. Not surprisingly, and as soon as Nietzsche managed to come to his own, he broke also with Wagner, whose nationalism and anti-Semitism he could no longer tolerate. "The Birth of Tragedy" is Nietzsche's first book; it is inspired, but flawed and the arguments tend to be occasionally quite reckless. Some of his formulations are quite farfetched, as well and the work, on the whole, is a fairly horrible example of purple prose.
Rating: 5
Summary: Classic Metaphysics and Philosophy
Comment: Certainly one of the most influential books in the Western World, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy is also of great interest to the modern day metaphysician and astrologer. Nietzsche explains the alchemy between the god Apollo and the god Dionysius which can be related to the eternal dialogue in the astrology chart between the male and female polarities. Apollo, the Sun, the Solar God and Dionysius, the mysterious and undone god, well symbolized in the chart by the planet Neptune, approach the truth and the source of wisdom in diametrically opposed but mutually supportive manners. This book is as alive today as it was when it was first published. It is a critical text in learning to understand the dialogue between the right and the left brain from a philosophical and metaphysical perspective.
Rating: 3
Summary: An interesting insight into the early Nietzsche.
Comment: "The Birth of Tragedy" (1872) was Nietzsche's first published work, and what a work it is. Taking as its point of departure the origins and eventual death of tragedy in ancient Greece, this book shouldn't be taken as a literal meditation on Greek tragedy. Instead, Nietzsche uses his discussion of this art form to analyse trends he saw in the Germany of the early-1870s and to examine the similarities between the Hellenic world and the world of Bismarckian Germany.
He begins with an explanation of the dual Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies in art. The Apollonian, based on illusion, form, and restrained aesthetic contemplation, is contrasted with the Dionysian, which is characterized by a visceral, ecstatic, transcendental state. To Nietzsche, Greek tragedy was the only art form which was able to merge these two conflicting aesthetics into a successful union. He likens the operas of his then-hero, Richard Wagner, to the tragic drama of ancient Greece, and suggests that this similarity should be a cause of hope for the renewal of the "German spirit."
Crazy? Of course. Nietzsche was not a man noted for his intellectual restraint, and his associative thinking is never wilder or more disputable than in "The Birth of Tragedy." It is this very wildness which would later lead the philosopher to all but disown this book.
But "The Birth of Tragedy" is more than far-fetched theorizing--it is also a penetrating gaze into the destructive side of pure reason and the sunny optimism of the Enlightenment, which Nietzsche posits as being embodied in ancient Greece in the form of Socrates, whose withering, anti-aesthetic thinking Nietzsche finds deadening and repugnant. In the hyper-rational, heavily bureaucratic world in which he found himself at the dawn of the 1870s, Nietzsche looked to the colossal operas of Wagner to find a counterbalance to the icy skepticism of Socrates (and the Enlightenment) and what he considered to be a fundamental misunderstanding of ancient Greek culture on the part of his contemporaries. In stark contrast to their appraisal of Greek culture as serene and harmonious, Nietzsche located the enduring greatness of the Hellenic world in its brave and fierce pessimism, which he saw best represented in tragedy.
"The Birth of Tragedy," then, is a cry of hope from its author for what he considered a renewal of German myth and unity. It does not make for easy reading, however, and the reader should be prepared for many, many pages of exhausting and often ludicrous "insights," not one of which makes much sense from a logical point of view, but all of which play a vital role in Nietzsche's brilliant and brilliantly original analyses of ancient and modern culture.
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Title: Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche ISBN: 0486406636 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 16 June, 1999 List Price(USD): $3.50 |
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Title: Beyond Good & Evil : Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future by Walter Kaufmann, Friedrich Nietzsche ISBN: 0679724656 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 17 December, 1989 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Will to Power by Friedrich Nietzsche ISBN: 0394704371 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 12 August, 1968 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: The Gay Science : With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs by Walter Kaufmann, Friedrich Nietzsche ISBN: 0394719859 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 12 January, 1974 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Anti-Christ by H. L. Mencken, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche ISBN: 1884365205 Publisher: Independent Publishers Group Pub. Date: August, 1999 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
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