Work · Life & Existential Philosophy
The Birth of Tragedy
Apollonian and Dionysian – tragedy and its death at the hands of Socrates.
Introduction
Nietzsche’s first book appeared in January 1872, when he was a 27-year-old professor of classical philology in Basel; it is dedicated to Richard Wagner. Drawing on Schopenhauer, it explains Greek tragedy as the union of two artistic drives: the Apollonian world of image, measure and individuation, and the Dionysian intoxication in which the individual dissolves. It ends by hoping for a rebirth of tragic culture in Wagner’s music drama. The philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff attacked the book in a pamphlet titled “Zukunftsphilologie!” (Philology of the Future!), and Nietzsche’s standing in his discipline suffered. In 1886 he reissued it with an “Attempt at Self-Criticism” that distanced him from his early Wagnerism.
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Connections
Builds on
- The World as Will and Representation1819 · Arthur Schopenhauer
Criticizes
- Poeticsc. 335 BCE · Aristotle
More works by Friedrich Nietzsche
- 1882The Gay Science
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