1
IN order to be just to ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ (1872) one will have to forget a few things. It made its effect and even exercised fascination through what was wrong with it − through its application to Wagnerism, as if this were a symptom of a beginning. That is what made this book an event in Wagner’s life: it was only from then on that great hopes surrounded the name Wagner. Even today people remind me, sometimes in the middle of Parsifal, that it is really I who have it on my conscience that so high an opinion of the cultural value of this movement has come to predominate. − I have often found the book cited as ‘the Rebirth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music’: people have had ears only for a new formula for the art, the intention, the task of Wagner − what of value was concealed in the book was thereby not listened to. ‘Hellenism and Pessimism’: that would have been a less ambiguous tide: that is to say as a first instruction in how the Greeks got rid of pessimism − with what they overcame it… Precisely tragedy is the proof that the Greeks were no pessimists: Schopenhauer blundered in this as he blundered in everything. − Taken up and viewed impartially, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ looks very untimely: one would not dream it was begun amid the thunders of the battle of Wörth. I thought these problems through before the walls of Metz, in cold September nights while serving in the medical corps; one would rather believe the book to be fifty years older. It is politically indifferent − ‘un-German’ one would say today − it smells offensively Hegelian, it is in only a few formulas infected with the cadaverous perfume of Schopenhauer. An ‘idea’ − the antithesis Dionysian and Apollonian − translated into the metaphysical; history itself as the evolution of this ‘idea’; in tragedy this antithesis elevated to a unity; from this perspective things which had never before caught sight of one another suddenly confronted with one another, illuminated by one another and comprehended… for example opera and revolution… The book’s two decisive novelties are, firstly the understanding of the dionysian phenomenon in the case of the Greeks − it offers the first psychology of this phenomenon, it sees in it the sole root of the whole of Hellenic art − The other novelty is the understanding of Socratism: Socrates for the first time recognized as an agent of Hellenic disintegration, as a typical décadent. ‘Rationality’ against instinct. ‘Rationality’ at any price as dangerous, as a force undermining life! − A profound hostile silence with regard to Christianity throughout the book. Christianity is neither Apollonian nor Dionysian, it negates all aesthetic values − the only values ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ recognizes: it is in the profoundest sense nihilistic, while in the Dionysian symbol there is attained the extreme limit of affirmation. In one place the Christian priests are alluded to as a ‘malicious species of dwarfs’, as ‘subterraneans’…
2
This beginning is remarkable beyond all measure. I had discovered the only likeness and parallel to my own innermost experience which history possesses − I had therewith become the first to comprehend the wonderful phenomenon of the dionysian. By recognizing Socrates as a décadent I likewise offered a quite unambiguous proof of how little the certainty of my psychological grasp stood in danger of influence from any kind of moral idiosyncrasy − morality itself as a symptom of décadence is a novelty, a unique event of the first order in the history of knowledge. How high above and far beyond the pitiable shallow-pated chatter about optimism contra pessimism I had leapt with these conceptions! − I was the first to see the real antithesis − the degenerated instinct which turns against life with subterranean vengefulness (− Christianity, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, in a certain sense already the philosophy of Plato, the whole of idealism as typical forms) and a formula of supreme affirmation born out of fullness, of superfluity, an affirmation without reservation even of suffering, even of guilt, even of all that is strange and questionable in existence… This ultimate, joyfullest, boundlessly exuberant Yes to life is not only the highest insight, it is also the profoundest, the insight most strictly confirmed and maintained by truth and knowledge. Nothing that is can be subtracted, nothing is dispensable − the sides of existence rejected by Christians and other nihilists are even of endlessly higher rank in the order of rank of values than that which the décadence instinct may approve of and call good. To grasp this requires courage and, as a condition of this, a superfluity of strength: for precisely as far as courage may dare to go forward, precisely by this measure of strength does one approach truth. Recognition, affirmation of reality is for the strong man as great a necessity as is for the weak man, under the inspiration of weakness, cowardice and flight in the face of reality − the ‘ideal’… They are not at liberty to know: décadents need the lie − it is one of the conditions of their existence. − He who not only understands the word ‘dionysian’ but understands himself in the word ‘dionysian’ needs no refutation of Plato or of Christianity or of Schopenhauer − he smells the decomposition…
3
The extent to which I therewith discovered the concept ‘tragic’, the knowledge at last attained of what the psychology of tragedy is, I most recently expressed in the Twilight of the Idols. ‘Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types − that is what I called dionysian, that is what I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not so as to get rid of pity and terror, not so as to purify oneself of a dangerous emotion through its vehement discharge − it was thus Aristotle misunderstood it − : but, beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming − the joy which also encompasses joy in destruction…’ In this sense I have the right to understand myself as the first tragic philosopher − that is to say the extremest antithesis and antipodes of a pessimistic philosopher. Before me this transposition of the dionysian into a philosophical pathos did not exist: tragic wisdom was lacking − I have sought in vain for signs of it even among the great Greeks of philosophy, those of the two centuries before Socrates. I retained a doubt in the case of Heraclitus, in whose vicinity in general I feel warmer and more well than anywhere else. Affirmation of transitoriness and destruction, the decisive element in a dionysian philosophy, affirmation of antithesis and war, becoming with a radical rejection even of the concept ‘being’ − in this I must in any event recognize what is most closely related to me of anything that has been thought hitherto. The doctrine of ‘eternal recurrence’, that is to say of the unconditional and endlessly repeated circular course of all things − this doctrine of Zarathustra could possibly already have been taught by Heraclitus. At least the Stoa, which inherited almost all its fundamental ideas from Heraclitus, shows traces of it. –
4
A tremendous hope speaks out of this writing. I have in the end no reason whatever to renounce the hope for a dionysian future of music. Let us look a century ahead, let us suppose that my attentat on two millennia of anti-nature and the violation of man succeeds. That party of life which takes in hand the greatest of all tasks, the higher breeding of humanity, together with the remorseless destruction of all degenerate and parasitic elements, will again make possible on earth that superfluity of lifeout of which the dionysian condition must again proceed. I promise a tragic age: the supreme art in the affirmation of life, tragedy, will be reborn when mankind has behind it the consciousness of the harshest but most necessary wars without suffering from it… A psychologist might add that what I in my youthful years heard in Wagnerian music had nothing at all to do with Wagner; that when I described dionysian music I described that which I had heard − that I had instinctively to translate and transfigure into the latest idiom all I bore within me. The proof of this, as strong a proof as can be, is my essay ‘Wagner in Bayreuth’: in all the psychologically decisive passages I am the only person referred to − one may ruthlessly insert my name or the word ‘Zarathustra’ wherever the text gives the word Wagner. The entire picture of the dithyrambic artist is a picture of the pre-existent poet of Zarathustra, sketched out with abysmal profundity and without so much as touching on the Wagnerian reality for a moment. Wagner himself had an idea of this: he failed to recognize himself in the essay. − The ‘Bayreuth idea’ had likewise transformed itself into something that those who know my Zarathustra will find no riddle: into that great noontide when the most select dedicate themselves to the greatest of all tasks − who knows? the vision of a festival I shall yet live to see… The pathos of the first pages is world-historic; the glance which is spoken of is the actual glance of Zarathustra; Wagner, Bayreuth, the whole petty German wretchedness, is a cloud in which an endless fata morgana of the future is reflected. Even psychologically all the decisive traits of my own nature are worked into that of Wagner − the proximity to one another of the brightest and most fateful forces, the will to power as it has never been possessed by any man, the ruthless bravery in the things of the spirit, the boundless strength to learn without the will to action being thereby stifled. Everything in this essay is prophetic: the proximity of the return of the Greek spirit, the necessity for counter Alexanders to retie the Gordian knot of Greek culture after it had been untied… Listen to the world-historic accent with which the concept ‘tragic disposition’ is introduced: there are in this essay nothing but world-historic accents. This is the strangest ‘objectivity’ there can be: the absolute certainty of what I am projected itself on to any reality that chanced to appear − the truth about myself spoke out of a dreadful depth. The style of Zarathustra is described and anticipated with incisive certainty; and one will find nowhere a more magnificent expression for the Zarathustra event, the act of a tremendous purification and dedication of mankind.