The Birth of Tragedy

Or

Hellenism and Pessimism

by Friedrich Nietzsche

translated by Sean D. Kirkland and Andrew J. Mitchell

1
Figures

1. Raphael, The Transfiguration, 1516–1520, “tempera grassa” on wood, 410 x 270 cm. Located
in the Pinoteca of the Musei Vaticani, Vatican City, Italy.

2. Diagram of Greek Theater

3. Apollino (or “Medici Apollo”), Roman copy of Greek original, 1st century CE, Parian marble,
141 cm. Located in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy.

4. Bernardino Luini, Crucifixion and Scenes from the Life of Christ, 1529, fresco, rood screen;
approx. 30m x 12m. Located in Santa Maria degli Angeli church , Lugano, Switzerland.

5. Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), print in black ink from copper plate
engraving, 23.3 x 18.8 cm. This copy located in the Richard Wagner Museum, Lucern,
Switzerland. OR Located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, USA.

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[11]

An Attempt at Self-Criticism1

1.

Whatever might lie at the base of this questionable book: it must have been a question of the first

rank and attraction, still more a deeply personal question — a testament to this is the time in

which it arose, despite which it arose, the exciting time of the Franco-German war of 1870/71.2

As the thunder from the Battle of Wörth3 rolled across Europe, the brooder and friend of riddles,

whose part it was to become the father of this book, sat somewhere in a corner of the Alps, much

brooding and beriddled, consequently much concerned and unconcerned4 at the same time, and

wrote down his thoughts about the Greeks5 — the core of the fantastical and barely accessible

book, to which this belated preface (or postface) is to be dedicated.6 A few weeks later: and he

found himself beneath the walls of Metz,7 still not yet free from the question mark that he had

placed after the supposed “cheerfulness” of the Greeks and of Greek art; until finally, in that

month of the deepest tension, as the peace was being discussed in Versailles,8 he also came to

peace with himself and, slowly convalescing from an illness brought home from the battlefield,9

ultimately established for himself the “birth of tragedy from out of the spirit of music” [12]

— From out of music? Music and tragedy? Greeks and the music of tragedies? Greeks and the

artwork10 of pessimism? The most well-developed, most beautiful, most envied type of human

hitherto, the greatest enticement to living, the Greeks — what? precisely they had a need for

tragedy? More still — art? For what — Greek art? . . .

One could guess from this where the great question mark concerning the value of

existence was placed. Is pessimism necessarily the sign of downfall, of decay, of failure, of

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weary and debilitated instincts? — as it was with the Indians, as it is, by all appearances, with us

“modern” humans and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual predilection

for what is hard, ghastly, evil, problematic in existence from out of wellbeing, from overflowing

health, from fullness of existence? Is there perhaps a suffering from superabundance itself? A

most sharp-sighted tempting bravery, one that requires the frightful, as the enemy, the worthy

enemy, against whom it can test its force? from whom it will learn what “fear” is?11 Precisely for

the Greeks of the best, strongest, boldest age, what did tragic myth mean? And the monstrous

phenomenon of the Dionysian?12 What of tragedy, born from the latter? — And again: what

tragedy died of, the Socratism of morals,13 dialectics, the satisfaction and cheerfulness of the

theoretical human — how now? could not precisely this Socratism be a sign of downfall, of

weariness, sickness, of the anarchic dissolution of the instincts? And the “Greek cheerfulness” of

later Greekdom merely an afterglow? The Epicurean will against pessimism a mere precaution

of the sufferer?14 And science itself, our science — yes, viewed as a symptom of life, what does

science as a whole generally signify? For what use, or worse yet, whence — all science? What?

Is scientism perhaps merely a fear and an evasion of [13] pessimism? A fine bulwark against —

the truth? And, speaking morally, something like cowardice and falsehood? Speaking immorally,

a shrewdness? Oh Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? Oh secretive ironist, was this

perhaps your — irony? — —

2.

What I got hold of at that time was something frightening and dangerous, a problem with horns,

not necessarily a bull exactly, but in any case, a new problem: today I would say that it was the

problem of science itself — science for the first time conceived as problematic, as questionable.

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But the book, in which my youthful courage and suspicion then vented itself — what an

impossible book had to grow forth from a task so contrary to youth! Built upon noisy premature

overly green personal experiences, which all lay just at the threshold of communicability, erected

on the basis of art — for the problem of science cannot be recognized on the basis of science —

a book perhaps for artists with a secondary propensity for analysis and retrospection (that means

for an exceptional kind of artist, for whom one would have to search and perhaps never hope to

find . . .), full of psychological innovations and artists’ secrets, with an artists’ metaphysics in the

background, a youthful work full of youthful courage and youthful melancholy, self-reliant,

defiantly-independent, even where it appears to bow before an authority with proper reverence,

in short a first work, and in every bad sense of the term, despite its grey-haired problems,

afflicted with every error of youth, above all by its “much too long,” its “Sturm und Drang”:15,16

on the other hand, regarding the success it had (in particular with Richard Wagner, the great

artist to whom it addressed itself as though in dialogue), a proven book, I mean one that in any

case did enough for “the best of his own age.”17 In view of this, it should indeed be treated with a

little respect and discretion; nevertheless I do not want to entirely suppress how unpleasant it

now appears to me, how strange it now stands before me, after sixteen years — before an eye

grown older, a hundred times more fastidious, but in no way colder, which has not yet become

estranged from that very task which this audacious book had risked for the first time — to view

science through the lens of the artist, but art through that of life . . . .

3.

Said once again, today it is for me an impossible book — I call it poorly written, heavy handed,

embarrassing, mad with images and confused by images, emotional, sweetened here and there to

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the point of femininity, uneven in tempo, lacking the will to logical cleanliness, firmly convinced

and thus high-handed about proof, even distrustful of the elegance of proof, as a book for the

initiated, as “music” for those baptized into music, who are bound from the beginning of things

by communal and rare art-experiences, as an indication of blood relations in artibus18 — a

haughty and enthusiastic book, which from the outset concluded more against the profanum

vulgus19 of the “educated” than against the “people,” which, however, as its effect has proved

and still proves, must have understood itself well enough even in this, to seek out its co-

enthusiasts and to entice them onto new hidden paths and dance floors. In any case, here there

spoke — something one conceded just as much with curiosity as with antipathy — a foreign20

voice, the disciple of a still “unknown god,”21 who meanwhile hid himself under the cowl of the

scholar, under the heaviness and dialectical listlessness of the Germans, even under the [15] bad

manners of the Wagnerians; here was a spirit with foreign, still nameless needs, a memory

bristling with questions, experiences, concealments, to whom was attributed the name, more like

a question mark, of Dionysus; here spoke — as one said to oneself with suspicion — something

like a mystic and nearly maenadic22 soul, which, with toil and caprice, almost indecisive about

whether it wanted to communicate or conceal, stammered, as it were, in a foreign tongue. It

should have sung, this “new soul” — and not spoken! What a shame, that I did not dare to say

what I had to say at that time as a poet: I perhaps could have done it! Or at least as a philologist:

— even today for the philologists in this area nearly everything still remains to be discovered and

dug up! Above all the problem that a problem lies here before us — and that, as long as we have

no answer to the question “what is Dionysian?,” the Greeks are, now as before, entirely unknown

and unimaginable . . .

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 4.

Yes, what is Dionysian? — In this book there is an answer — “one who knows” speaks here, the

initiate and disciple of his god. I would now perhaps speak more cautiously and less

grandiloquently about such a difficult psychological question as the origin of tragedy among the

Greeks. A fundamental question is the relationship of the Greek to pain, his degree of sensitivity

— does this relationship remain constant? or does it reverse itself? — that question, whether his

ever stronger demand for beauty, for festivals, merriments, new cults, has actually arisen from a

lack, from deprivation, from melancholy, from pain? Assuming then that precisely this were true

— and Pericles (or Thucydides) gives us to understand as much in the great funeral speech23 — :

where must the opposing demand then stem from, the one that arose earlier in time [16], the

demand for the ugly, the good strict will of the older Hellenes for pessimism, for tragic myth, for

the images of everything frightening, evil, puzzling, annihilating, portentous at the ground of

existence — from where would tragedy then have to arise? Perhaps from joy, from force, from

overflowing health, from an excessive fullness? And what meaning would that delusion then

have, physiologically considered, from which tragic as well as comic art grew, the Dionysian

delusion? What? Is delusion perhaps not necessarily a symptom of the degeneration, the

downfall, of an overly late culture? Is there perhaps — a question for psychiatrists — a neurosis

of health? of the youth and youthfulness of a people? What does that synthesis of god and goat in

the satyr24 indicate? From what personal experience, from what compulsion must the Greek

consider the Dionysian enthusiasts and primordial humans as satyrs? And something that

concerns the origin of the tragic chorus: were there perhaps raptures endemic to those centuries

where the Greek body blossomed, where the Greek soul brimmed over with life?25 Visions and

hallucinations, which spread themselves through entire communities, entire cult gatherings?26

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How? when the Greeks, precisely in the wealth of their youth, had the will to the tragic and were

pessimists? when it was precisely delusion, to use a word of Plato’s,27 that had brought the

greatest blessings upon Hellas? And when, on the other hand and conversely, the Greeks

precisely in the age of their dissolution and enervation, became ever more optimistic, more

superficial, more theatrical, even more fervent for logic and the rendering-logical of the world,

thus simultaneously “more cheerful” and “more scientific”? How so? despite all “modern ideas”

and the prejudices of democratic taste, could the victory of optimism, the rationality that has

become predominant, the practical and theoretical utilitarianism, like the democracy itself with

which it is contemporary — perhaps be a symptom of [17] declining force, of approaching old

age, of physiological fatigue? And precisely not — pessimism? Was Epicurus an optimist —

precisely as one who suffers? — — One sees, it is an entire bundle of difficult questions, with

which this book is burdened — let us add to this its most difficult question! Viewed through the

lens of life, what is the meaning of — morality? . . .

5.

Already in the foreword to Richard Wagner, art — and not morality — was proposed as the

genuine metaphysical activity of the human; in the book itself, the provocative claim recurred

multiple times, that only as an aesthetic phenomenon is the existence of the world justified.28

Indeed, the whole book knows only an artist’s-sense and hidden-sense behind all occurrences —

a “god,” if one will, but certainly only an entirely unscrupulous and amoral artist-god, who in

building as in destroying, in the good as in the bad, wants to become aware of the same pleasure

and self-mastery, which in producing worlds is released from the distress of fullness and over

fullness, from suffering the pressing oppositions within. The world, at every moment the

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achieved redemption of god, as the eternally changing, eternally new vision of that most

suffering, most oppositional, most contradictory being, who only knows to redeem itself in

semblance: one may call this entire artists’ metaphysics arbitrary, pointless, fantastic — what is

essential in this is that it already divulges a spirit that for once, despite every danger, sets itself

against the moral interpretation and meaningfulness of existence. Here is announced, perhaps for

the first time, a pessimism “beyond good and evil,”29 here is voiced and formulated that

“perversity of disposition,”30 against which Schopenhauer from the outset never grew tired of

hurling his most furious curses and thunderbolts — a philosophy that dared [18] to base morality

itself in the world of appearance, debasing it, situating it not only among “appearances” (in the

sense of the idealistic terminus technicus31), but rather among “deceptions,” such as semblance,32

delusion, error, interpretation, emendation, art. Perhaps the depths of this anti-moral proclivity

are best measured by the guarded and inimical silence with which Christianity is treated

throughout the book — Christendom as the most extravagant exposition of the moral theme that

humanity has ever been made to hear. In truth, there is no greater opposition to this purely

aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world, as taught in the book, than Christian

doctrine, which is and wants to be only moral and with its absolute measures, starting with the

truthfulness of god for example, relegates art, every art, to the realm of lies — this means denied,

damned, condemned. Behind a manner of thought and valuation of this kind, which must be

antagonistic to art so long as it is at all genuine, I also always detected something hostile to life, a

wrathful revenge-seeking counter-will opposed to life itself: for all life rests upon semblance, art,

deception, optics, the necessity of the perspectival and of errancy. Christendom was from the

beginning, essentially and fundamentally, the disgust and weariness of life toward life, which

merely disguises itself, hides itself, makes itself presentable through the faith in an “other” or

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“better” life. The hatred for the “world,” the curse upon the affects, the fear before beauty and

sensuality, a beyond invented in order to better denigrate what is here,33 at base, a longing for

nothingness, for the end, for taking a rest, for the “Sabbath of Sabbaths”34 — this all seems to me

to admit, as does the unconditioned will of Christendom, only moral values, always as the most

dangerous and uncanniest form of all possible forms of a “will to downfall,” at the very least, a

symptom of the deepest sickness, tiredness, surliness, [19] exhaustion, impoverishment of life —

for, in the face of morality (in particular, Christian, which means unconditioned, morality) life

must be constantly and unavoidably wronged, because life is something essentially immoral

— life, crushed by the weight of despisal and of the eternal no, must ultimately be perceived as

undesirable, as worthless in itself. Morality itself — what? should morality not be a “will to the

negation of life,” a secret instinct for annihilation, a principle of decay, of diminishment, of

denigration, a beginning of the end? And, consequently, the danger of dangers? . . . with this

questionable book, my instinct at that time then turned against morality, as an interceding

instinct of life, and it discovered a fundamental counter-doctrine and counter-valuation for life, a

purely artistic one, an antichristian one. What to call it? As a philologist and man of the word, I

baptized it, not without a few liberties — for who could know the correct name of the

Antichrist?35 — in the name of a Greek god: I named it the Dionysian. —

6.

Does one understand what task I already dared touch upon with this book? . . . How very much I

now regret that at that time I did not yet have the courage (or the immodesty?) to permit myself,

in every observation of such idiosyncratic intuitions and wagers, a language of my own36 — that

I laboriously sought to express, in Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulations, foreign and novel

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evaluations, which from the ground up run counter to the spirit of Kant and Schopenhauer, as

well as to their taste! Indeed, what did Schopenhauer think about tragedy? “What gives

everything tragic” — he says, World as Will and Representation II, 495 — “the characteristic

impetus to sublimity, is the dawning of the recognition that the world, that life cannot afford us

true satisfaction, and is therefore [20] not worth attachment to it: this is the spirit of tragedy —

and this is why it leads to resignation.”37 Oh how differently Dionysus spoke to me! Oh how far

from me at that time was precisely this whole resignationism! — But there is something even

worse in the book, that I regret today even more than having darkened and sullied Dionysian

intimations with Schopenhauerian formulations: namely, that I generally sullied for myself the

grandiose Greek problem, as it had arisen for me, through the admixture of the most modern

things! That I attached hopes where nothing was to be hoped for, where everything all too clearly

pointed to an end! That I, on grounds of recent German music, began to fabricate stories about

the “German essence,” as if it were just about to discover and regain itself — and this at a time

when the German spirit, which not long before still had the will to dominate Europe, the strength

to lead Europe, had just abdicated, finally and conclusively, and under the pompous pretext of

founding an empire, made its transition to mediocrity, to democracy and “modern ideas”! In fact,

in the meantime I learned to think hopelessly and inconsolably enough of this “German essence,”

likewise of contemporary German music, which is romanticism through and through and the

most un-Greek of all possible artforms: beyond this, however, it is a first-rank frayer of the

nerves, doubly dangerous for a people who loves drink and honors unclarity as a virtue, namely

in its dual property as an intoxicating and simultaneously befogging narcotic. — Admittedly,

apart from all the overhasty hopes and erroneous practical applications to the most contemporary

matters, with which at that time I sullied my first book, there remains, ever persisting, the great

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Dionysian question mark as posed therein, even in regard to music: how would a music have to

be created such that its origin would no longer be romantic, nor even German — but rather

Dionysian? . . .

[21]

7.

— But, dear sir, what in all the world is romanticism if your book is not romanticism? Can the

deep hatred against “contemporaneity,” “actuality” and “modern ideas” be driven any further

than has occurred in your artists’ metaphysics? — which believes in the nothing, in the devil,

rather than in the “now”? Does a ground bass38 not drone with anger and the desire for

annihilation among all of your contrapuntal voice-art and ear-seductions, a furious resolution

against everything that is “now,” a will that is indeed not too far from practical nihilism and

appears to say “rather let nothing be true, than you be right, than your truth retain the right!”

Listen for yourself with more open ears, Mister Pessimist and Art-Idolator, to a single selected

passage from your book, that not inelegant dragon-slayer passage, which for young ears and

hearts may sound seductively Pied-Piperish: how now? is that not the quite proper confession of

a romantic from 1830, beneath the mask of the pessimism of 1850?39 behind which also already

the prelude to that common finale of a romantic — breach, breakdown, reversal and collapse

before an old belief, before the old God40 . . . What? is your pessimists’ book not itself a piece of

anti-Greekdom and romanticism, itself rather “just as intoxicating as befogging,” a narcotic in

any case, a piece of music even, German music? But one hears:

Let us consider a generation growing up with this dauntlessness of gaze,

heroically pulled into the monstrous, let us think of the bold step of these dragon

slayers, the proud audacity with which they turn their back on all the doctrinal

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 delicacies in that optimism, so as “to live resolutely” in whole and in full: should

it not be necessary that, with his self-education in seriousness and in terror, the

tragic human of this culture desire a new art as the Helen who belongs to him,

that art of metaphysical solace, tragedy, and must he not call out with Faust:

And shall I not, with a most yearning vehemence,

bring to life this most singular figure?41

[22] “Should it not be necessary?” . . . No, three times no! you young romantics: it should not be

necessary! But it is very probable, that it ends thus, that you end thus, namely “consoled,” as it

stands written, despite all your self-education in seriousness and to horror, “metaphysically

consoled,” in short, as romantics end, Christian. . . . . No! you should first of all learn the art of

consolation in what is here — you should learn to laugh, my young friends, unless you want to

remain pessimists through and through; so that perhaps, as laughing ones, at some point someday

you might send all metaphysical consoling to the devil — and metaphysics first of all! Or, to say

it in the language of that Dionysian fiend called Zarathustra:

“Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And do not forget your legs either. Lift up

your legs too, you good dancers; and better yet, stand on your heads!

This crown of him who laughs, this rose-wreath crown: I myself have put on this crown, I

myself have pronounced my laughter holy. Nobody else have I found strong enough for this

today.

Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light, waves with his wings, ready for flight,

waving at all birds, ready and heady, happily lightheaded;

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 Zarathustra the soothsayer, Zarathustra the sooth-laugher, not impatient, not

unconditional, one who loves leaps and side-leaps: I myself have put on this crown!

This crown of him who laughs, this rose-wreath crown: to you, my brothers, I throw this

crown. Laughter I have pronounced holy; you higher men, learn to laugh!”

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, fourth part, P. 87.42

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 Foreword to Richard Wagner.

In order for me to hold at bay all the possible apprehensions, commotions and misunderstandings

that, given the peculiar character of our aesthetic public,1 will be occasioned by the thoughts

gathered in this text and also in order to be able to write the introductory words to this text with

the same tranquil bliss that marks every page, as the remnant of many good and uplifting hours, I

picture to myself the moment in which you, my highly respected friend, will receive this text:

perhaps after an evening stroll in winter’s snow, observing the Prometheus2 unbound there on the

title page, you will read my name and be immediately convinced that, whatever stands here in

this text, the author has something serious and urgent to say, as well as that he conversed with

you as though you were present, in everything he devised, and that he was only permitted to

write down what accorded with that presence. You will then recall that I put together these

thoughts at the very same time that your magisterial festschrift on Beethoven appeared,3 that is,

in the terror and grandeur of the war just broken out.4 Indeed, anyone who is led to find in this

composition an opposing of patriotic [24] excitement to aesthetic indulgence, of brave

seriousness to joyful play, would have gone astray: I would much prefer it become clear, through

an actual reading of the text, and astonishingly, that here we are dealing with a seriously German

problem, which we are placing right at the very center of German hopes, as vortex and turning

point.5 Perhaps it would be quite jarring for these very people to see an aesthetic problem taken

so seriously,6 should they be unable to recognize in art anything more than a pleasant pastime or

some utterly dispensable jingling of bells to the “seriousness of existence”: as though one did not

know what was involved in this juxtaposition with the “seriousness of existence.” May it serve to

instruct those serious ones, I have been convinced that art is the highest task and the genuine

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metaphysical activity of this life, in keeping with my7 sublime predecessor in fighting along this

path, to whom I here will have dedicated this text.

Basel, end of the year 18718

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 1.1

We will have won much for the science of aesthetics, if we gain not merely a logical insight, but

an immediate intuitive certainty that the advancement of art is bound up with the duality of the

Apollonian and Dionysian: in a similar way, reproduction depends on there being two sexes with

constant struggle and only periodic reconciliation. We borrow these names from the Greeks, who

reveal to the discerning the profound secret doctrine of their artistic intuition not in concepts, but

in the piercingly clear figures of their pantheon. From these two art deities, Apollo and Dionysus,

we recognize that in the Greek world there exists a monstrous opposition, in both origin and aim

between the image-maker’s art, the Apollonian, and the non-imagistic2 art of music, that of

Dionysus: these two very different drives unfold in parallel, mostly in open conflict and by

provoking one another to ever new and more powerful births, in order to perpetuate in these the

struggle of an opposition, only seemingly bridged by the shared term “art”; until they eventually

appear coupled together, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic “will” and through this

coupling ultimately generate Attic tragedy, an art form that is just as Dionysian as it is

Apollonian.3

In order to bring us closer to these two drives, let us think them initially as the separate

art-worlds of dream and intoxication; for between these two physiological phenomena we note

an opposition corresponding4 to the one between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. As

Lucretius5 tells us, it was in dreams that majestic divine figures first stepped before the souls of

human beings, in dreams the great sculptor beheld the alluring bodily forms of superhuman

beings, and the Hellenic poet when asked about the mysteries of poetic creation would have been

reminded of a dream and might have offered an explanation similar to that given by Hans Sachs

in the Meistersinger:

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

that he notes and interprets his dreams.

Believe me, man’s truest delusion

is opened to him in dreams:

All poetic art and poesy

are nothing other than true dream interpretations.6,7

The beautiful semblance of dream worlds, in the generation of which every human being is fully

an artist, is the precondition for all image-making arts, including even, as we shall see, an

important half of poesy. We delight in the immediate understanding of the figure, all forms speak

to us, nothing is indifferent or unnecessary. But even with this dream-reality at its most

vivacious, a feeling of its semblance still shimmers through to us: at least this is my experience,

though for its frequency, indeed normalcy, I could produce much testimony and the

proclamations of the poets. The philosophical human being even has a presentiment that beneath

this reality, in which we live and exist, a second wholly other reality lies concealed, and that

therefore the first would also be a semblance; and Schopenhauer characterizes as the hallmark of

philosophical ability, the gift of sometimes seeing other humans and indeed all things as mere

phantoms or dream images.8 Just as now the philosopher relates to the reality of existence, thus

does the artistically excitable individual relate to the reality of the dream; he looks on closely and

with relish: for from these images he interprets life for himself, and through these proceedings he

trains himself for life. And it is not only, for instance, the pleasant and friendly images that he

experiences as they are with that all-accepting reasonability:9,10 but what is serious, gloomy, sad,

sinister, the sudden inhibitions, the trickery of chance, the nervous expectations as well, in short

the whole “divine comedy” of life, including the inferno,11 draws past him,12 not merely as a

19
shadow-play — for he lives and suffers13 in these scenes — and yet also not without that fleeting

sensation of semblance; and perhaps, like me, some will14 recall, in the very midst of the dangers

and terrors of a dream, having cried out to themselves15 encouragingly and victoriously: “It is a

dream! I will dream it further!” I have also been told of people who were able to carry through

the causal connections of one and the same dream over three or more consecutive nights: these

facts16 provide clear evidence that our innermost essence, the shared subterranean ground of us

all, experiences the dream itself with deep pleasure and joyful necessity.

This joyful necessity of the dream experience was likewise expressed by the Greeks in

their Apollo: Apollo, as the god of all shape-giving forces, is at the same time the god of

prophecy.17 He, who is etymologically the “shining” one,18 is the divinity of light, and governs

also the beautiful semblance of the inner world of fantasy.19 The higher truth, the perfection of

these states as opposed to spottily intelligible everyday reality, as well as the deep consciousness

of nature that helps and heals in sleep and dream, is at the same time the symbolic analogue of

prophetic ability and to the arts20 in general, through which [28] life is made possible and worth

living.21 But just that fine line — must not be omitted from the image of Apollo, that line which

the dream image must not overstep, lest it have pathological effect, for otherwise the semblance

would deceive us and come to seem22 a crude reality: that measured restraint, that freedom from

wilder stirrings, that wise calm of the shape-giving god. His eye must be, according to its origin,

“sunlike”;23 even when it glares angrily and with displeasure, the consecration of beautiful

semblance lies upon it. And so what Schopenhauer24 says of those human beings caught in the

Veil of Maya25 may be true of Apollo, though in an eccentric sense. World as Will and

Representation I, p. 416:26 “Just as a captain sits in a boat, trusting the weak little vessel as the

raging, boundless sea raises up and casts down howling cliffs of waves,27 so the human

20
individual sits calmly in a world full of sorrow, supported by and trusting in the principium

individuationis.”28 Indeed, one would have to say of Apollo, that the unshaken29 trust in that

principium and the restful abiding of the one caught up in it would find its most sublime

expression in him, and one wants even to describe Apollo himself as the marvelous divine image

of the principii individuationis, from whose gestures and glances the entire30 pleasure and

wisdom of “semblance,” together with its beauty, speaks to us.

At this very spot Schopenhauer describes for us that monstrous dread, which seizes the

human being, when he suddenly becomes confused by the forms of knowledge belonging to

semblance, in that the principle of sufficient reason,31 regardless of the form it takes, seems to

suffer an exception.32 When we add to this dread the blissful rapture that surges up from the

innermost ground of the human, indeed from nature, at the rupture of the principii

individuationis, then we get a glimpse into the essence of the Dionysian, which we will approach

initially through the analogy of intoxication. Either under the influence of a narcotic drink,

described in their hymns by all original humans and all peoples, or through the forceful approach

of spring, which lustily penetrates all of nature, those Dionysian stirrings are awakened, in the

amplification of which everything subjective dwindles away into a complete self-forgetting. In

the German Middle Ages as well, ever growing crowds roamed from town to town, singing and

dancing, seized by the same Dionysian force: in the St. John and St. Vitus dancers33 we

recognize the bacchic choruses of the Greeks once again, with their pre-history in Asia Minor, up

to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea ceremony.34 There are human beings, who, whether out of a

lack of experience or obtuseness,35 turn either mockingly or indulgently away36 from such

phenomena, as from “popular illnesses,” with a sense of their own health: the poor things have

21
no notion of how corpselike and ghostly their “health” looks, when the glowing life of the

Dionysian revelers goes roaring past.37

Under the spell of the Dionysian it is not only the bond between human and human that is

reestablished: nature too, estranged, hostile or subjugated, celebrates once again her festival of

reconciliation with her lost son, the human being. The earth willingly offers up her gifts, and the

beasts of prey from the cliffs and the desert peaceably approach. The cart of Dionysus is draped

about with flowers and wreaths: panther and tiger stride beneath its yoke. Transform

Beethoven’s jubilant ode to “joy”38 into a painting and do not hold back your imagination, as the

millions sink into the dust shuddering: thus does one approach the Dionysian. Now the slave is a

free man, now destroyed are all the rigid, hostile distinctions established between human beings

by necessity, caprice or “impudent fashion.”39 Now, under the evangel of world harmony,

everyone feels not only unified, reconciled, or merged together with one’s neighbor, but indeed

one with him, as though the Veil of Maya had been torn apart and left fluttering there in tatters

before the mysterious primordial unity. Singing and dancing the human being expresses himself

as member of a higher community: he has unlearned walking and speaking and he is about to

take flight, dancing into the air. Enchantment is expressed through his very gestures. As now the

animals speak, and the earth gives milk and honey, so too there sounds out of him something

supernatural: he feels himself a god, he himself is now rapturously and exaltedly transformed,

just as he saw the gods transformed in his dreams. The human is no longer artist, he has become

artwork: here, to the great and blissful satisfaction of the primordial unity, the artistic force of the

whole of nature reveals itself amid shudders of intoxication. The human being, that noblest of

clay, that most precious of marble is here kneaded and hewn, and the call of the Eleusian

22
Mysteries40 rings out to the chisel blows of the Dionysian world artist: “Do you bow down, you

millions? Do you sense your creator, world?” — 41

23
 2.

We have up to now regarded the Apollonian and its opposite, the Dionysian, as artistic powers

that break forth from nature itself, without the mediation of human artists, and in which nature’s

artistic drives initially satisfy themselves directly: on the one hand, as the image-world of

dreams, the perfection of which bears no connection to the intellectual niveau or the artistic

education1 of the individual, and on the other hand, as the intoxicated reality, that once again

pays no heed to the individual, but even seeks to destroy the individual and redeem him by way

of a mystical sensation of unity. Relative to these immediate artistic states of nature, every artist

is an “imitator,” and indeed either an Apollonian dream-artist or a Dionysian intoxication-artist

or finally — as for example in Greek tragedy — simultaneously an intoxication- and dream-

artist: we would have to imagine him somehow, as one who, alone and apart from the swarming

chorus, sinks down in Dionysian drunkenness and mystical self-renunciation, and as one to

whom his own condition i.e., his oneness with the innermost ground of the world, is revealed by

means of an Apollonian dream-effect in an allegorical dream image.

After these general presuppositions and contrasts let us now approach the Greeks, in

order to identify to what degree and to what extent those artistic drives of nature had been

developed in them: doing so we will be in a position to understand more deeply and appreciate

the relationship of the Greek artist to his primordial images, or, in an Aristotelian expression, his

“imitation of nature.”2 In spite of all their dream-literature and their numerous accounts of

dreams, we can speak of the dreams of the Greeks only conjecturally, though nevertheless with a

fair amount of certainty: given the figural capacity of their gaze, unbelievably precise and

definite, together with their vivid and sincere delight in colors, one cannot help but assume, to

the shame of all those born later, that even their dreams evinced a logical causality of line and

24
contour, of colors and groups, a sequence of scenes as in their best bas-reliefs, and the perfection

of these, if such a comparison were possible, would certainly justify us, in characterizing

dreaming Greeks as Homers3 and Homer as a dreaming Greek: this in a deeper sense than when

modern humans risk comparing themselves to Shakespeare with respect to their dreams.

By contrast we need not merely speak conjecturally, when the enormous chasm is

uncovered, which separates the Dionysian Greeks from Dionysian barbarians. From all corners

of the ancient world — setting aside the modern one — from Rome to Babylon, we can prove

the existence of Dionysian festivals, which as a type, even in the best of cases, relate to the

Greek type, as the bearded satyr, borrowing its name and attributes from the stag,4 to Dionysus

himself. Almost everywhere, exuberant sexual licentiousness was at the center of these festivals,

the waves of which wash away everything familial along with its venerable regulations; precisely

the wildest beasts of nature were unleashed here, right up to that abhorrent combination of lust

and cruelty, which to me has always seemed the real “witches’ brew.” Even as an awareness of

the feverish stirrings of these festivals pressed itself upon them along every path, by land and by

sea, the Greeks were for a time, it seems, fully secured and protected by the figure of Apollo

raised up in his full pride, for he could not have held out the head of Medusa against any more

dangerous a power than this hideously uncouth Dionysian one. It is in Doric art5 where Apollo’s

majestically repudiating posture immortalized itself. This resistance ultimately became more

precarious and even impossible when similar drives erupted from the deepest root of the Hellenic

itself: now the work of the Delphic god was limited to taking the weapons from the hands of his

violent opponent in a reconciliation completed just in time. This reconciliation is the most

important moment in the history of the Greek cultus: wherever one looks, the reverberations of

this event are visible. It was the reconciliation of two opponents, with a precise determination of

25
the boundary lines to be observed from this point forward and with the periodic exchange of

ceremonial gifts; at base the chasm was not bridged.6 But if we observe how the Dionysian

power manifested itself under the pressure of this peace accord, then, in comparison with the

Babylonian Sacaea and its regression of the human into tigers and apes, we can now recognize,

in the Greeks’ Dionysian orgies the significance of such festivals of world redemption and days

of transfiguration. It is only with these that nature achieves its artistic jubilation, only with these

that the rending of the principii individuationis becomes an artistic phenomenon. That dreadful

witches’ brew of lust and cruelty was here powerless: only the Dionysian revelers’ miraculous

mixture and doubling of affect recalls this — as a remedy recalls a deadly poison — the

phenomenon, that pains awaken desire, that jubilation tears agonized sounds from the breast.

From the highest joy resounds a cry of horror or a longing lamentation for an irreplaceable loss.

In those Greek festivals a sentimental trait of nature breaks forth, as if she were exasperated by

her being partitioned into individuals. The song and the gestural language of such doubly

determined revelers was something new and unheard of for the Homeric Greek world: and

Dionysian music in particular aroused terror and dread. Even if music was apparently known

previously as7 an Apollonian art, it was so only, strictly speaking, as a wavelike pounding of

rhythm, the shape-giving force of which had been developed into a presentation of Apollonian

states. The music of Apollo was a Doric architectonic in tones,8 but only suggested tones, as are

characteristic of the kithara.9 Cautiously held at bay, as un-Apollonian, is precisely that element

which determines the character of Dionysian music, and thereby music in general, the shocking

violence of tone, the unified stream of melody10 and the thoroughly incomparable world of

harmony. In the Dionysian dithyramb the human being is provoked into the utmost

intensification of all his symbolic capacities; something never felt before forces its way into

26
expression, the annihilation of the Veil of Maya, oneness as the genius of the species, indeed of

nature. Now the essence of nature is to express itself symbolically; a new world of symbols is

necessary, even the whole bodily symbolism, not only the symbolism of the mouth, the face, the

word, but all the gestures of dance rhythmically moving every limb. And then the other symbolic

forces, those of music, suddenly grow boisterous in rhythmics, dynamics and harmony. In order

to grasp this complete unleashing of all symbolic forces, the human must have already achieved

that height of self-renunciation, which wants to express itself through those forces symbolically:

the dithyrambic servant of Dionysus is thus understood only by his own kind! With what

astonishment must the Apollonian Greek have looked upon him! With an astonishment that was

even greater for him because mixed with the dread that all this was actually not so foreign to

him, indeed that his Apollonian consciousness was only a veil covering over this Dionysian

world before him.

27
 3.

In order to grasp this, we must clear away that artful edifice of Apollonian culture stone by stone,

until we glimpse the foundations, upon which it was grounded. Here we first catch sight of the

magnificent forms of the Olympian deities, who stand atop the gables1 of this edifice, and whose

deeds, depicted in radiantly glowing reliefs, adorn its friezes.2 If Apollo stands among them, as

one god alongside others and with no claim to superior rank, we must not let ourselves be misled

by this. The drive made sensible in Apollo is that same drive, which gave birth to the whole

Olympian world in general, and in this sense we can regard Apollo as its father. What was the

monstrous need, from which such a glowing company of Olympian beings spring forth?

Whoever comes upon these Olympians, with another religion in his heart, looking to

them for moral elevation, or even holiness, for disincarnate spirituality, or for a compassionate

loving regard, he will soon be forced to turn his back on them discouraged and disappointed.

Nothing here suggests asceticism, spirituality or duty: speaking to us here is only an opulent,

indeed a triumphant existence, one in which everything present is deified, regardless of whether

it is good or evil. And the spectator, rightly disconcerted before this fantastic exuberance of life,

may well ask himself, what magical potion they swallowed to make these audacious humans so

thoroughly enjoy life that, wherever they looked, they saw Helen,3 the ideal image of their own

existence, “floating in sweet sensuality”4 and laughing back at them. To this spectator already

turning to leave, however, we must call out: “Don’t rush off, but listen first to what Greek folk

wisdom has to say about this life, unfurled here before you with such inexplicable cheerfulness.

As the old legend goes, King Midas5 hunted long in the forest for wise Silenus, the companion of

Dionysus, without catching him. When Silenus finally fell into his hands, the king asked, what

28
the very best and most excellent thing for a human being would be. Rigid and unmoving the

daemon kept silent; until finally, pressed by the king, he broke out in shrill laughter with these

words: “Wretched ephemeral race, child of chance and hardship, is not what you compel me to

tell you, just what it would profit you most not to hear? The very best thing is for you entirely

unattainable: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. The second best for you — to die soon.”

How does the world of the Olympian gods relate to this folk wisdom? As the rapturous

vision of the tortured martyr to his torments.

The magic mountain of Olympus now opens up for us, so to speak, and shows us its

roots. The Greek knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence: in order to live at all, he had

to place before these the gleaming dreamlike birth of the Olympians.6 That monstrous distrust of

the Τitanic7 powers of nature, that Moira8 mercilessly enthroned above all knowledge, that

vulture of humanity’s great friend, Prometheus, that terrible lot of the wise Oedipus,9 that curse

on the house of Atreides,10 which drove Orestes to matricide,11 in short the whole philosophy of

that sylvan god, together with its mythical examples, of which the melancholic Etruscans12

ultimately perished — all this was continually conquered anew13 by the Greeks through that

artistic middle-world of the Olympians, or at any rate hidden and kept from view. In order to

live, the Greeks had to create these gods, out of deepest necessity: a sequence of events that we

might well imagine for ourselves thus, an original Titanic pantheon of terror gradually develops

by means of the Apollonian drive toward beauty into the Olympian pantheon of joy: like roses

breaking forth from a thorny bush. How else could such a people, so excitably sensitive, so

tempestuously desiring,14 so uniquely capable of suffering, have endured existence, if it had not

been shown to them in their gods, suffused with a higher glory. That same drive, which calls art

to life, as the supplement and completion of existence, seducing us to yet more life, also allowed

29
the emergence of the Olympian world, that transfiguring mirror in which the Hellenic “will”

views itself. Thus, the gods justify human life in that they themselves live it — the only

satisfying theodicy! Existence in the bright sunlight of such gods was experienced as something

worth striving for in itself, and the genuine pain of the Homeric human lies in departing from

this life, and above all in departing early: so that one now could say of them, in a reversal of the

Silenic wisdom, “the worst of all for them, would be to die soon, the second worst, to die at all.”

If this complaint about the leaf-like changes and vicissitudes of the human race, about the decline

of the age of heroes, was ever raised, it was surely then echoed by short-lived Achilles.15 It is not

unworthy of the greatest heroes to long for more life, even if it be as a day-laborer. At this

Apollonian stage, the will demands this existence16 so impetuously, the Homeric human feels

himself so much at one with it, that even the complaint itself becomes a song of praise.

Here it must be stated that this harmony, viewed with such longing by more modern

humans, indeed this unity of the human with nature, for which Schiller introduced the technical

term “naïve,”17 is by no means some simple, self-generating condition, inevitable as it were,

which we would have to encounter at the entrance gate of every culture, as a human paradise:

this could only be believed by an age that sought to construe even Rousseau’s Émile18 as an artist

and imagined it had found in Homer just such an artistic Émile, reared at the breast of nature.

Wherever we encounter the “naïve” in art, we must recognize the highest effect of Apollonian

culture: which19 always first had to topple an empire of Titans and slay its monsters and which

through forceful delusions and pleasant illusions had to triumph over a view of the world in its

terrifying depths and a most excitable capacity for suffering. But20 how seldom is the naïve

actually achieved, that complete immersion in the beauty of semblance! How inexpressibly

sublime is Homer, therefore, who as an individual relates to that Apollonian folk-culture as the

30
individual dream-artist relates to the dream-capacity of his people and to nature in general.

Homeric “naïveté” is only to be understood as the accomplished victory of Apollonian illusion:

so often, in fulfilling her aims, nature uses just such an illusion. The true goal is concealed with a

delusion: we stretch out our hands toward the latter, while nature accomplishes the former

through our deception. With the Greeks, the “will” wanted to view itself in the transfiguration of

genius and the world of art; in order for the will to glorify itself, its creations had to experience

themselves as worthy of glorification, they had to see themselves again in a higher sphere, but

without this envisioned perfect world coming to function as an imperative or a reproach. This is

the sphere of beauty in which they beheld their mirror images, the Olympians. With this

mirroring of beauty, the Hellenic “will” fought against the talent for suffering and for the

wisdom of suffering, a talent correlate to that of the artist: and as a monument to this triumph

Homer stands before us, the naïve artist.

31
 4.1

The dream analogy teaches us something about these naïve artists. If we imagine the dreamer, in

the midst of the illusion of the dream-world, who without disturbing it calls out: “it is a dream, I

will dream it further,” if we conclude from this that there is a deep inner desire for dream

visualization, and if, on the other hand, in order to be able to dream at all with this inner desire

for vision, we must have completely forgotten the day and its terrible intrusiveness: then we

could interpret all these phenomena somewhat in the following manner, under the guidance of

dream-interpreting Apollo. Certainly, of the two halves of life, the waking and the dreaming

halves, the former seems to us incomparably preferable, more important, more honorable, more

worthy of living, indeed as the only one that is lived: but nevertheless, despite every appearance

of a paradox, I would like to claim for that secretive ground of our being, whose appearance we

ourselves are, precisely the opposite2 evaluation of the dream. That is, the more that I become

aware of those all-governing artistic drives in nature and of an ardent yearning for semblance

within them, for redemption by semblance, all the more do I feel myself compelled toward the

metaphysical conjecture that the truly extant and primordial-One, eternally suffering and rife

with contradiction, at the same time needs the enchanting vision, the pleasing semblance, for its

constant redemption: a semblance which we, fully captured it and constituted by it, are required

to experience as the truly-nonexistent i.e., as a continuous becoming in time, space and causality,

or in other words, as empirical reality. If we then look away from our own “reality” just for a

moment, grasping our empirical existence, and that of the world more generally, as a

representation of the primordial-One produced at every moment, we will then have to hold3 the

dream as the semblance of a semblance, and thus as a still higher satisfaction of the primordial-

32
desire for semblance. From this same ground, the innermost heart of nature takes an

indescribable pleasure in the naïve artist and in that naïve artwork, which is nonetheless only the

“semblance of a semblance.” Raphael, himself one of those immortal “naïve ones,” represents

for us in an allegorical painting that disempowering of semblance to semblance,4 the primordial

process of the naïve artist and at the same time of Apollonian culture. In his Transfiguration,5 the

lower half of the painting shows us, with its possessed children, despairing followers, and

clueless anxious youths, a mirroring back of the eternal primal pain, of the sole ground of the

world: here the “semblance” is a reflection of the eternal contradiction, of the father of things.

From this semblance there now arises, like an ambrosial fragrance, a new visionary illusory

world, which those captivated by the first semblance do not see — a luminous hovering in purest

bliss and unpained contemplation, radiating from wide-open eyes. Here we have before our gaze,

in highest artistic symbolism, that Apollonian world of beauty and its subterranean ground, the

terrible wisdom of Silenus, and we grasp, through intuition, their reciprocal necessity. But

Apollo we encounter once again as the deification of the principium individuationis, in which

alone the eternally achieved goal of the primordial-One, its redemption through semblance, is

accomplished: he shows us, in sublime6 gestures, how the whole world of agony is necessary, in

order to compel the individual to produce that redeeming vision and then, sunk in contemplation

thereof,7 sit calmly in his wavering bark, in the middle of the ocean.

This deification of individuation, if it is to be thought of as mainly demanding and issuing

stipulations, knows only one law, the individual i.e., the observance of the limits of the

individual, measure in the Hellenic sense. Apollo, as ethical deity, demands measure of his

followers, and, in order to retain it, self-knowledge.8 And so there runs alongside the aesthetic

necessity of beauty the command to “know thyself” and of “nothing in excess!,” while self-

33
aggrandizement and immoderation were deemed the genuinely evil demons of the non-

Apollonian sphere, thus as characteristics of the pre-Apollonian era, the age of the Titans, and of

the extra-Apollonian world i.e., the barbarian world. Due to his titanic love of humanity9

Prometheus had to be torn apart by vultures, because of his excessive wisdom, which solved the

riddle of the sphinx, Oedipus had to fall into a dizzying vortex of misdeeds: thus did the Delphic

god interpret the Greek past.

“Titanic” and “barbaric,” so would the effect aroused by the Dionysian have seemed to

the Apollonian Greek: without thereby being able to hide the fact that at the same time he

himself10 might even be inwardly related to those toppled Titans and heroes. Yes he must have

sensed still more: his entire existence with all its beauty and moderation rested on a veiled

subterranean ground of suffering and knowledge, which would be disclosed to him again through

the Dionysian. And look! Apollo could not live without Dionysus! The “Titanic” and the

“Barbaric” were in the end just as necessary as the Apollonian!11 And now let us consider, how

the ecstatic tone of the festival of Dionysus in ever more enticing magical melodies rang through

this artistically insulated world that was built upon semblance and moderation, how in this the

whole excess of nature becomes clamorous in desire, suffering and knowledge, to the point of a

piercing cry: let us imagine, what the psalmodizing artist of Apollo, and the ghostly tones of his

harp,12 would have meant over against these daemonic folk songs! The muses of the arts of

“semblance” pale before an art that in its intoxication spoke the truth, the wisdom of Silenus

cried Woe! Woe! to the cheerful Olympians. The individual, with all his limits and measures,

here underwent the self-forgetting of those Dionysian states and forgot the precepts of Apollo.

Excess unveiled itself as truth, as contradiction, and a bliss born of pain proclaimed itself from

out of the very heart of nature. So it was that everywhere where the Dionysian penetrated, the

34
Apollonian was abolished and annihilated.13 But it is just as certain, that there, where the first

onslaught was withstood, the esteem and majesty of the Delphic god expressed itself more

sternly and threateningly than ever before. I can only explain the Doric state and Doric art as an

abiding outpost of the Apollonian: only in an incessant counter-striving against the titanic-

barbaric essence of the Dionysian14 could an art so defiantly aloof and surrounded with

bulwarks, an education so bellicose and austere, and a state so cruel and lacking in respect last

for long.

Up to this point, I have only expanded upon what was noted at the outset of this treatise:

how the Dionysian and the Apollonian in a series of ever new births, reciprocally intensifying

one another, have dominated Hellenic existence:15 how under the reign of the Apollonian drive

for beauty16 the Homeric world developed out of the “bronze” age,17 with its battles against the

Titans and its austere folk philosophy, how this “naïve” mastery was again engulfed by the

inundating stream of the Dionysian, and how the Apollonian set over against this new power

elevated itself to the stern majesty of the Doric art and worldview. If in this way ancient Hellenic

history, in the battle of those two antagonistic principles, falls into four great stages of art:18 then

we are now compelled, to inquire further into the final plan of this development and drive, unless

the period just reached, that of Doric art, were somehow to count for us as the pinnacle and aim

of those artistic drives: but here the sublime and highly prized artwork of Attic tragedy and

dramatic dithyramb comes into view, as the common goal of both drives, whose mysterious

marriage, after long preceding battles, was glorified with such a child — at once Antigone and

Cassandra —.

35
 5.1

We are now approaching the actual goal of our investigation, which is directed at knowledge of

the Dionysian-Apollonian genius and his artwork, at least at the portentous understanding of that

mysterious union. Here we provisionally2 ask, where in the Hellenic world does the new seed3

that subsequently developed4 into tragedy and the dramatic dithyramb first make itself known?

Antiquity itself provides us with graphic evidence of this, when it places Homer and Archilochus

next to one another in sculptural works, on cameos etc. as the primal fathers and torch bearers of

Greek poetry, certain in the sentiment that only this pair of equal and utterly original natures

were to be regarded as such, a stream of fire having flowed forth from them upon the entirety of

Greek posterity. Homer, the venerable dreamer sunk within himself, the prototype of the

Apollonian, naïve artist, now looks on in astonishment at the passionate head of the bellicose

servant of the muses, Archilochus, driven wildly forth through existence: and modern aesthetics

could only add interpretively that here the first “subjective” artist is set over against the first

“objective” one. This interpretation does us little good, for we are acquainted with the subjective

artist only as a bad artist and in every form and level of art it is first and foremost the conquest of

the subjective, the redemption from the “I” and a silencing of every individual will and craving,

that is demanded, indeed without objectivity, without pure disinterested intuition we could never

believe in the slightest truly artistic production. And so our aesthetics must first solve this

problem of how the “lyric poet” as an artist is possible: he who always says “I” and sings for us

the whole chromatic scale of his passions and appetites, as every age attests. Precisely this

Archilochus, placed alongside Homer, terrifies us, through the cry of his hatred and scorn,

through the drunken outbursts of his desire; is he, the first artist deemed subjective, not thereby

36
the genuine non-artist? But why then the reverence accorded to him, to this poet, in those

remarkable pronouncements made by the Oracle of Delphi,5 the very hearth of “objective” art?

Schiller sheds light on the process of his own poetizing for us by means of a

psychological observation, one that seemed even to him inexplicable, though not troubling; he

confesses namely that the preparatory condition before the actus6 of poetizing is not one of

holding before and in oneself something like a7 series of images with an ordered causality of

thought, but rather much more a musical attunement (“With me the feeling initially is without

definite or clear object; this takes shape later. A certain musical attunement precedes it, and in

me the poetic idea only follows thereafter.”).8 Let us now take up the most important

phenomenon of the whole of ancient lyric poetry, the unification, indeed the identity of the lyric

poet and the musician, which is everywhere acknowledged as natural — and by contrast our

modern lyric poetry seems a headless idol — then are we able, on the basis of the aesthetic

metaphysics presented previously, to explain the lyric poet in the following way. He is first, as a

Dionysian artist, entirely united with the primordial-One, with its pain and contradiction, and he

produces a copy of this primordial-One as music, if this can rightly be termed both a repetition of

the world and a second outpouring of the same;9 now however this music becomes visible to him

once again as though in an analogical dream image, under the Apollonian dream effect. Without

image or concept, that reflection of the primordial pain in music, along with its redemption in

semblance, now produces a second mirroring, as an individual likeness or example. The artist

has already surrendered his subjectivity in the Dionysian process: the image, that now shows him

his union with the heart of the world, is a dream scene, which makes sensible that primordial

contradiction and primordial pain, together with the primordial desire for semblance. The “I” of

the lyric poet thus resounds from out of the abyss of being: his “subjectivity” in the sense of

37
modern aesthetics is a delusion. When Archilochus, the first lyric poet of the Greeks, announces

his raging love and at the same time his contempt for the daughters of Lycambes,10 it is then not

his passion that dances before us in an orgiastic frenzy: we see Dionysus and the maenads, we

see the intoxicated enthusiast Archilochus sunk down in sleep — as Euripides describes it for us

in the Bacchae,11 asleep on high Alpine pastures, in the midday sun — : and now Apollo

approaches and touches him with laurels. The Dionysian-musical enchantment of the sleeper

now sprays image sparks all about, so to speak, lyric poems which, at the pinnacle of their

unfolding, are called tragedies and dramatic dithyrambs.

The sculptor, as well as the epic poet related to him, is sunk in the pure intuition of

images. The Dionysian musician without any image is himself entirely primordial pain and

primordial echo of the same. From out of the mystical condition of self-alienation and

unification, the lyric genius feels a world of image and analogy growing forth, which bears a

completely different coloration, causality and pace than that world of the sculptor and epic poet.

While the latter lives with joyful comfort in these images, and only in these, and does not tire of

lovingly contemplating them down to the finest detail, and even the image of the raging Achilles

is for him merely an image, whose raging expression he enjoys with that dreaming pleasure in

semblance — with the result that he, through the mirror of illusion, is protected against a

unification and fusion with his figures — by contrast the images of the lyric poet are nothing

other than he himself and only various objectifications of him, as it were, for which reason, as

the moving center of that world, he is permitted to say “I”: only this I-ness is not the same as that

of the waking, empirically real human being, but rather it is indeed that I-ness, truly extant and

eternal, resting at the ground of things, through whose copies the lyrical genius peers into that

ground of things. Now let us think for once, how among these copies he also catches sight of

38
himself as non-genius i.e., as “subject,” that whole bustle of subjective passions and excitations

of the will, directed toward some particular, real-seeming thing; if the lyrical genius and the non-

genius bound up with him should appear to us now as one and if the former should now appear

to speak of himself with that little word “I,” then this illusion would no longer be able to seduce

us, as it had certainly seduced those who designated the lyric poet a subjective poet. Archilochus,

that passionately enflamed loving and hating human being, is in truth only a vision of that

genius, already no longer Archilochus, who is instead the world genius and who symbolically

expresses its primordial pain through that likeness, the human Archilochus: while that

subjectively willing and desiring human Archilochus could never once be a poet. It is however

not at all necessary that the lyric poet see before himself the phenomenon of the human

Archilochus alone as a reflection of eternal being; and tragedy proves just how far the visionary

world of the lyric poet can distance itself from that phenomenon which nevertheless stands so

close.

Schopenhauer, who did not fail to perceive the difficulty that the lyric poet poses for the

philosophical consideration of art, believed he had found a way out of it, though here I cannot go

along with him, since for him alone, through his profound metaphysics of music, the means were

placed in his hands by which that difficulty could be decisively removed: as I believe myself, in

his spirit and in his honor,12 to have done here. By contrast, he characterizes the proper essence

of song in the following way (World as Will and Representation I, P. 295): “It is the subject of

the will i.e., one’s own willing, that fills the consciousness of the singer, often as a liberated,

satisfied willing (joy), but even more often as a frustrated willing (sorrow), always as affect,

passion, as an excited state of mind. Besides this however and together with it, the sight of nature

around him makes the singer aware of himself as the subject of pure, will-less cognition, whose

39
imperturbable, blissful peace now forms a contrast with the pressure of ever-restricted, always

needy willing: the sensation of this contrast, of this back-and-forth, is what the song as a whole

really expresses and what in general constitutes the lyrical state. In this state, pure cognition

draws towards us, as it were, to deliver us from willing and the stress of willing: we follow, but

only for a moment: we are always torn back again from peaceful contemplation by willing, by

the memory of our personal aims; but again and again we are enticed from willing the next time

we are in beautiful surroundings in which pure, will-less cognition presents itself to us. That is

why in song and in the lyrical mood, willing (a personal interest in the goal13) and pure intuiting

of the surroundings presented, are wonderfully imbricated with each other: the relationships

between the two are sought out and imagined; the subjective mood, the affecting of the will

colors the intuited surroundings in reflection, and these surroundings in turn color the mood: the

song proper is the imprint of the whole state of mind that is mixed and shared in this way.”14

Who could fail to recognize in this sketch, that here lyric poetry is characterized as an art

imperfectly achieved, so to speak, in lunges and seldom reaches its goal, indeed as a half-art,

whose essence is supposed to consist in that willing and pure intuiting i.e., the unaesthetic and

the aesthetic conditions would be wonderfully mixed together? Concerning the whole opposition

of the subjective and the objective, which even Schopenhauer still employs as a standard for

dividing up the arts, we maintain on the contrary, that this opposition is entirely improper to the

field of aesthetics, for the subject, the individual willing and pursuing his own egoistical ends,

can only be thought of only as an antagonist of art, not as its origin. For insofar as that subject is

an artist, he is already redeemed from his individual will and has become so to speak a medium

through which a truly extant subject celebrates its redemption in semblance. For, to both our

humiliation and elevation, this must above all be clear to us, that in general the whole comedy of

40
art is not carried out for our sake, for the sake somehow of our betterment and education, and

indeed that just as little are we the actual creators of that art world: indeed we must even accept

of ourselves, that for the true creator thereof we are its images and artistic projections and that

we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art — for only as an aesthetic

phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified: — while admittedly our consciousness

concerning this significance of ours is scarcely different from that which soldiers painted on a

canvas have of the battle depicted around them. Thus our whole knowledge of art is at base

something fully illusory, because as knowers we are not one and identical with that essence

which prepares for itself an eternal enjoyment as sole creator and spectator of the comedy of art.

Only inasmuch as the genius in the actus of artistic production fuses with that primordial artist of

the world, does he know something about the eternal essence of art; for in that condition he is, in

wondrous ways, like that uncanny fairytale figure, who can turn round its eyes and view itself;

now he is at once subject and object, at once poet, actor15 and spectator.16,17

41
 6.

[48] Concerning Archilochus, scholarly research has discovered1 that it was he who introduced

the folk song into literature2 and on account of that deed in the general estimation of the Greeks3

he was accorded that singular position alongside Homer. But what is the folk song as opposed to

the completely Apollonian epic? What else but a perpetuum vestigium4 of the unification of the

Apollonian and the Dionysian; the monstrous pervasiveness of which, stretching itself out over

all peoples and intensifying itself in ever new births, is for us evidence of just how strong that

dual natural drive is: it leaves a trace behind in folk song analogous to how the orgiastic

movements of a people immortalize themselves in their music. Indeed, it would even have to be

historically demonstrable that a period rich in the production of folk songs would also be most

strongly excited by Dionysian currents, which we have always recognized as the subterranean

ground and precondition for folk song.

For us the folk song amounts first of all to a musical mirror of the world, an original

melody, which now seeks for itself a parallel dream appearance and gives voice to this in poetry.

Melody is thus what is primary and universal, which itself is therefore able to suffer multiple

objectifications, across multiple texts. It is even more important and more necessary by far in the

naïve estimation of the people. Melody gives birth to poetry from out of itself and indeed ever

[49] anew; for us, the strophe form of the folk song means nothing other than this: a phenomenon

I have always observed with astonishment, until I arrived at this explanation. Whoever looks at a

collection of folk songs e.g., The Boy’s Magic Horn,5 with this theory in mind will find

innumerable examples of how the continuously generative melody sprays forth image sparks

about itself: in their colorful variety, in their sudden changing, indeed in their mad

precipitousness, they manifest a power completely foreign to epic semblance and its docile

42
onward flow. From the standpoint of epic, lyric poetry’s uneven and irregular world of images is

simply to be condemned: and in the age of Terpander this is just what those solemn epic

rhapsodes of the Apollonian festivals did.

In the poetry of folk song, we thus see language straining itself to the utmost in order to

imitate music: and therefore with Archilochus a new world of poesy begins, one that contradicts

the Homeric world in its deepest ground. And here we have indicated the only possible relation

between poesy and music, between word and tone: the word, the image, the concept seeks an

expression analogous to that of music and now suffers the force of music itself. In this sense, we

can distinguish in the linguistic history of the Greek people two main currents6 according to

whether the language is imitating the world of appearance and imagery or the world of music.

One need only reflect more deeply for a moment upon the linguistic difference in color, in

syntactic construction, in vocabulary between Homer and Pindar in order to grasp the

significance of this opposition; indeed, it will become palpably clear to anyone that the orgiastic

flute melodies of Olympus must have resounded between Homer and Pindar,7 melodies that even

in the age of Aristotle with its infinitely more developed music wrested people away into

drunken enthusiasm and in their original effect certainly roused the people of that age to place

their poetic means of expression in the service of imitation. I am reminded here of [50] a well-

known phenomenon of our day that seems only to offend our aesthetics. We experience it again

and again, as a symphony of Beethoven presses the individual listener to speak in images, even if

it is the case that a piece of music’s combination of different image worlds appears quite

fantastically varied, even contradictory: it very much belongs to that kind of aesthetic to exercise

its impoverished wit on such compilations even as it overlooks a phenomenon that is truly

worthy of interpretation. Indeed even if the tone-poet has spoken of his own composition in

43
images, characterizing a symphony as pastoral, or describing one movement as a “scene at the

brook” and another as a “merry gathering of country folk,”8 these are in any case only

representations born from out of the music — and not at all objects imitated by the music —

representations that cannot in any way teach us about the Dionysian content of the music, nor

can they claim any exclusive value over other images. This process of a discharging of music in

images we now have to transfer to a youthful, linguistically creative mass of people, in order to

arrive at some notion of how the strophic folksong emerged and how the whole linguistic

capacity was stimulated through music’s new principle of imitation.

Can we consequently regard lyric poetry as the imitative conflagration of music in

images and concepts, such that we might then ask: “how does music appear in imagery and

concepts?” It appears as will, this word taken in its Schopenhauerian sense, i.e., as the very

opposite of an aesthetic, purely contemplative will-less attunement. Now one must distinguish

here as precisely as possible the concept of essence from that of appearance: for music,

according to its essence, cannot possibly be will, for if it were so it would be banned from the

domain of art entirely — the will being the very unaesthetic itself — ; nevertheless it [51]

appears as will. For in order to express its appearance in images, the lyric poet deploys all the

stirrings of passion, from the whisperings of affection to the rumblings of madness; driven to

speak of music in Apollonian likenesses, he understands the whole of nature, and himself within

it, only as that eternal willing, desiring, yearning.9 But insofar as he interprets music in images,

he himself rests in the calm still waters of Apollonian contemplation, and so much so that

everything he beholds through the medium of music is surging and driving, in motion all about

him. Indeed when he views himself through this same medium, his own image appears to him in

a state of emotional dissatisfaction: his very own willing, yearning, groaning, crying out is to him

44
a likeness, by way of which he interprets music. This is the phenomenon of the lyric poet: as

Apollonian genius he interprets music through the image of willing, while he himself, fully

released from the greed of willing, is the pure unclouded eye of the sun.

This entire discussion maintains that lyric poetry is dependent upon the spirit of music

just as music itself, completely unrestricted, does not need the image and the concept, but only

tolerates them alongside itself. The poetry of the lyric poet cannot express anything that was not

already to be found in its most monstrous universality and validity in music, which compels him

to speak in images. Precisely for this reason the symbolic world of music can in no way be

exhaustively rendered in language, because it relates symbolically to the primordial contradiction

and primordial pain at the heart of the primordial-One, and thereby symbolizes a sphere beyond

all appearance and prior to all appearance. Compared with this, every appearance is only

likeness: hence, language, as the organ and symbol of appearances, is never and nowhere able to

externalize the deepest interior of music, but rather, whenever it involves itself with the imitation

of music, it always remains merely in superficial contact with it, while all lyrical [52] eloquence

can bring us not a single step closer to music’s deepest significance.10

45
 7.1

We must now avail ourselves of all previously discussed principles of art in order2 to find our

way in that labyrinth we must call the origin of Greek tragedy. I do not think it unfitting to

proclaim that until now the problem of this origin has not once been seriously raised, much less

solved, however often the tattered shreds of the ancient tradition have been stitched together and

torn apart again. This tradition tells us with full decisiveness that tragedy emerged from the

tragic chorus and that it was originally chorus and only chorus: it is on account of this that we

are obliged to look into the heart of this tragic chorus as the authentic primordial drama, even as

we remain unsatisfied with the empty generalizations of contemporary art discourse — that it

would either be the ideal spectator or it would represent3 the people set against the princely

region of the stage.4 The latter may well evoke for many politicians edifying and sublime-

sounding thoughts5 — as if the immutable moral law of the democratic Athenians were presented

in the people’s chorus, which ever retained its rights over against the impassioned transgressions

and excesses of kings — and this theory may be strongly suggested by a passage in Aristotle:6

but it has no bearing on the original formation of tragedy, since the whole opposition between

people and prince, indeed the political-social sphere in general,7 is excluded from those purely

religious origins; but, with regard to the classical form of the chorus known to us from Aeschylus

and Sophocles, we would view it as blasphemy to speak here of any intimation of a

“constitutional representation of the people,” a [53] blasphemy from which others do not recoil.

The ancient state constitutions in praxi8 know nothing of a constitutional representation of the

people and hopefully also never “intimated” anything of this in their tragedy.

Far more well-known than this political account of the chorus is the that of A. W.

Schlegel, which suggests we regard the chorus to a certain extent as the epitome and distillate of

46
the mass of spectators, the “ideal spectator.” This view, bound together with the historical

tradition that originally tragedy was only chorus, proves itself to be what it is, a coarse,

unscientific, but shining proclamation, which achieves its shine only by the concentrated form of

its expression, by the genuine German predilection for everything called “ideal” and by our

momentary astonishment. We are astonished, namely, as soon as we compare the theater-going

public with which we are so familiar to that chorus and ask ourselves whether it would ever be

possible to idealize, from out of this public, something analogous to the tragic chorus. We deny

this in silence and now wonder as much at the audacity of the Schlegelian proclamation as at the

totally different nature of the Greek public. In particular, we have ever maintained that the proper

spectator, whoever he may be, would always have to remain conscious of having before him a

work of art, not an empirical reality: while the tragic chorus of the Greeks is compelled to

acknowledge the figures on the stage as physically existent beings. The chorus of the Oceanides9

really believed they saw before them the titan Prometheus, and they thought themselves just as

real as the god on the stage. And that is supposed to be the highest and purest type of spectator,

taking Prometheus for something physically present and real, just as the Oceanides do? And

would it not be the mark of the ideal spectator to run onto the stage and free the god from his

torments? We had believed in an aesthetic public and understood the individual [54] spectator to

be all the more capable, the more he was in a position to take the artwork as art i.e., aesthetically;

and now the Schlegelian interpretation suggests to us that the completely ideal spectator allows

the world of the stage to affect him not at all aesthetically, but rather physically and empirically.

O these Greeks! we sigh;10 they topple our aesthetics! But having become accustomed to this, we

repeated the Schlegelian slogan every time the chorus was mentioned.

47
 But here that quite explicit tradition speaks against Schlegel: the chorus in itself, without

the stage, thus the primitive form of tragedy and that chorus of ideal spectators cannot tolerate

one another. What genre of art could be drawn from the concept of the spectator, the authentic

form of which would amount to the “spectator in itself.” The spectator without spectacle is a

contradictory concept. We fear that the birth of tragedy is explained neither by reverence for the

moral intelligence of the masses, nor by the concept of the spectator without a play and we take

this for a problem so deep that it is barely touched by such shallow considerations.

An infinitely more valuable insight concerning the significance of the chorus was already

divulged by Schiller in the famed preface to The Bride of Messina, which considers the chorus a

living wall that tragedy draws about itself in order to close itself off entirely from the actual

world and protect11 its ideal soil and poetic freedom.12

With this as his main weapon Schiller fought against the common conception of the

natural, against the illusion commonly required of dramatic poesy. While in the theater, the day

itself is merely artificial, the architecture merely symbolic and the metric language bears an ideal

character, a misunderstanding nevertheless prevails throughout: it is not enough to tolerate as

poetic license that which is rather the essence of all poesy. The introduction of [55] the chorus

would be the decisive step by which war is13 openly and honorably declared against every

naturalism in art. — It appears to me that for this point of view, our age, fancying itself superior,

uses the dismissive catchphrase “pseudo-idealism.” I fear that, to the contrary, with our

contemporary veneration of the natural and actual we have arrived at the polar opposite of all

idealism, indeed at the land of wax museums. Even in this there is an art, as with certain beloved

novels of the present: only one would not torment us with the claim that, with this art,

Schillerian-Goethean “pseudo-idealism” would be overcome.

48
 To be sure, according to Schiller’s correct insight, it is an “ideal” soil upon which the

Greek satyr-chorus, the chorus of original tragedy, is obliged to roam, a soil raised high above

the actual pathways of mortals. For this chorus, the Greeks constructed for themselves the

swaying scaffold of a feigned natural condition and placed feigned natural beings upon it.

Tragedy has grown up on this foundation and it was for this reason, already from its beginning,

relieved of any painstaking portrayal of reality. It is not for this reason, however, some arbitrarily

fantasized world between heaven and earth; far rather it is a world possessing as much reality

and believability as that of Olympus together with its inhabitants for the believing Hellene. The

satyr as the Dionysian choreut14 lives in a religiously constituted reality sanctioned by myth and

cult. That tragedy begins with him, that from out of him the Dionysian wisdom of tragedy

speaks, is for us here just as alienating a phenomenon as the emergence of tragedy from the

chorus more generally. Perhaps we gain a point of departure for our considerations, when I put

forth the proclamation that the satyr, the feigned natural being, relates to a cultured person in the

same way that Dionysian music relates to civilization. Of the latter, Richard Wagner says that it

[56] is dissolved by music, like lamplight by daylight.15 In the same way, I believe, the cultured

Greek felt himself dissolved in the face of the satyr chorus: and this is the most proximal effect

of Dionysian tragedy, that the state and society, the whole cleft between person and person gives

way to an overwhelming feeling of unity, leading back to the heart of nature. The metaphysical

solace — which, as I am already here suggesting, every true tragedy provides — that at the

foundation of things, in spite of all the changing appearances, life is indestructibly powerful and

pleasurable, this solace appears with lively clarity as the satyr chorus, as a chorus of natural

beings who live ineradicably behind all civilization, as it were, and who remain eternally the

same despite all the changing of generations and the histories of peoples.

49
 The Hellene, deeply sensitive and singularly capable of the most tender and the most

severe suffering, consoles himself with this chorus, he who has looked boldly right into the

frightful destructive activity of so-called world history, as well as into the cruelty of nature, and

is thus in danger of longing after a Buddhist denial of the will. Art saves him, and through art,

life saves him — and itself.

Along with16 its annihilation of the usual strictures and limits of existence, the rapture of

the Dionysian condition contains, as long as it lasts, a lethargic element, in which everything

personally experienced in the past is now immersed. Thus are the world of the everyday and that

of Dionysian reality cut off from one another by this cleft of forgetfulness. As soon as that

everyday reality again enters into consciousness, however, it is received as such with nausea; an

ascetic, will-denying mood is the fruit of these states. In this sense, the Dionysian human bears a

similarity to Hamlet: both have at one time or another cast a true glance into the essence of

things, they have known, and it nauseated them [57] to act; since their acting can alter nothing in

the eternal essence of things, they find ridiculous or humiliating this unreasonable expectation

that they once again set right a world out of joint. Knowledge killed action, to action there

belongs a being enveloped by illusion — that is the lesson of Hamlet, not that hackneyed

wisdom of Hans the dreamer,17 who through too much reflection, from an excess of possibilities,

as it were, never got around to acting; not reflecting, no! — true knowledge, the insight into the

horrible truth topples every motive leading to action, for Hamlet just as much as for the

Dionysian human being. Now solace no longer entraps, a yearning for death reaches out beyond

the world, beyond the gods themselves, a yearning that existence be denied, along with its

gleaming mirror image in the gods or in some immortal beyond. In the awareness of the once

seen truth, the human now sees everywhere only the dreadfulness or absurdity of being, he now

50
understands what is symbolic in the fate of Ophelia, he recognizes the wisdom of the sylvan god

Silenus: it nauseates him.

Here in this greatest threat to the will, there approaches as a saving, healing enchantress,

art; she alone is able to bend those nauseating thoughts concerning the dreadful or absurd in

existence into representations with which one can live: these are the sublime as the artistic

taming of the dreadful and the comic as the artistic discharging of the nausea of the absurd. The

satyr chorus of the dithyramb is the saving deed of Greek art; in the middle world of these

companions of Dionysus those previously described impulses exhausted themselves.18

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 8.1

[57] The satyr like the idyllic shepherd of our modern era is the spawn of a yearning after the

originary and the natural; [58] but with what a firm, unflinching grasp did the Greek embrace his

forest people, and how bashfully and meekly the modern human flirts with the flattering image

of a tender, flute-playing, mild-mannered shepherd! Nature, upon which knowledge has not yet

labored, in which the bars of culture remain unbreached — that is what the Greek saw in his

satyr, and thus for him still not something to be confused with an ape.2 On the contrary: the satyr

was the archetype of the human, the expression of his supreme and strongest stirrings, as an

enthused reveler, enraptured by the nearness of the god, as a compassionate companion, in whom

the suffering of the god repeated itself, as a proclaimer of wisdom from out of the deepest bosom

of nature, and as an emblem of the sexual omnipotence of nature, which the Greek was

accustomed to regarding with reverent amazement. The satyr was something sublime and divine:

and he must have seemed especially so to the painfully fractured view of the Dionysian human.

To him, the sanitized, fabricated shepherd would have been an insult: his eye would have

lingered in sublime satisfaction upon those unabashed and unfaded grandiose strokes of nature;

here the illusion of culture was wiped away from the archetype of the human, here the true

human being unveiled itself, the bearded satyr, jubilant before his god. Before him, the cultured

human being shrivels up into a fraudulent caricature. Even in regard to these beginnings of tragic

art Schiller had it right: the chorus is a living wall against the onslaught of reality, because it —

the satyr chorus — portrays existence more truly, actually, and completely than the common

cultured human being, who imagines himself the sole reality. The sphere of poesy does not lie

outside the world, as a fantastical impossibility of some poet’s brain: indeed, it wants to be the

exact opposite, the undiminished expression of truth and for that very reason it must cast off the

52
fraudulent costume of the cultured human’s supposed reality. The contrast between this authentic

truth of nature and the cultural lie passing itself off as the sole reality [59] is similar to the

contrast between the eternal core of things, the thing in itself, and the entire world of appearance:

and just as tragedy provides a metaphysical solace pointing toward the eternal life at the very

core of existence, through the continual downfall of its appearances, thus the symbolism of the

satyr chorus already expresses itself in a likeness of that primordial relationship between the

thing in itself and appearance. The modern human’s idyllic shepherd is merely a counterfeit of

the sum of cultural illusions that for him count as nature; the Dionysian Greek wants truth and

nature at full force — he sees himself magically transformed into a satyr. 3

Thusly attuned and aware, the raving throng of the servants of Dionysus rejoice: by

whose power they themselves were transformed before their very own eyes, such that they

imagined they saw themselves as restored natural geniuses, as satyrs. The later constitution of the

tragic chorus is the artistic imitation of this natural phenomenon; therein however it became

necessary to distinguish the Dionysian spectator from those enchanted by Dionysus. Only one

must always keep in mind that the audience of Attic tragedy rediscovered itself in the chorus of

the orchestra, that fundamentally there was no opposition between audience and chorus; for all is

but a grand sublime chorus of dancing and singing satyrs or of those who allow themselves to be

represented by these satyrs. Here the Schlegelian phrase must disclose to us a deeper sense. The

chorus is the “ideal spectator” insofar as it is the only viewer, the viewer of the vision-world on

stage. An audience of spectators, as we know it, was unknown to the Greeks: in their theaters,4

with the terraces of the spectatorial space rising in concentric arcs,5 it was entirely possible for

each to actually overlook the whole cultural world around himself and in absorbed viewing to

imagine himself a chorus member. According to this insight we can refer to the chorus, in its

53
primitive phase [60] in primordial tragedy, as a self-mirroring of the Dionysian human: a

phenomenon that6 is made most clear in the process of an actor, who, with true talent, sees

hovering before his eyes an image of the role he is to present, tangible enough to grab hold of.

The satyr chorus is first of all a vision of the Dionysian masses, just as, conversely, the world of

the stage is a vision of this satyr chorus:7 the force of this vision is strong enough to dull and

desensitize the gaze against the impression of “reality,” against the cultured people seated around

on the rows of benches. The form of the Greek theater calls to mind a lonesome mountain valley:

the architecture of the stage appears as a luminous cloud formation, which the Bacchants raving

over the mountains catch sight of from on high, providing the majestic frame at the center of

which the image of Dionysus is revealed to them.

That artistic primordial appearance, which we bring up here in order to explain the tragic

chorus, is almost offensive according to our learned view of elementary artistic processes; for

nothing could be better established than the fact that the poet is only a poet insofar as he sees

himself surrounded by figures, living and acting right there in front of him, and peers into their

innermost being.8 Through a typical weakness of our modern talent, we are inclined to imagine

the primordial aesthetic phenomenon in too complex and abstract a manner. For the genuine poet

metaphor is not a rhetorical figure, but a surrogate image, actually hovering before him, in place

of a concept. For him, a character is not some whole composed of individual traits gathered

together, but rather a person, compellingly alive before his very eyes, distinguished from the

painter’s vision of the same only by its continuing survival and activity. How can Homer depict

things so much more intuitively than all the other poets? Because he intuits just that much more.

We speak about poesy so abstractly, because we are all usually such bad poets. Fundamentally,

[61] the aesthetic phenomenon is simple; should one merely possess the capacity to see

54
constantly a living play and to live evermore surrounded by a bevy of ghosts, then one is a poet;

should one merely feel the drive to transform oneself and to speak from out of other bodies and

souls, then one is a dramatist.

Dionysian excitation is in a position to share this artistic talent with an entire crowd of

people, such that they too see themselves surrounded by just such a bevy of ghosts, with whom

they know themselves inwardly to be one. This process of the tragic chorus is the dramatic

primordial phenomenon: to see oneself transformed before one’s eyes and now to act as though

one were actually in another body, as though having entered another character. This process

stands at the beginning of the development of drama. Here is something distinct from the

rhapsode, who does not fuse with his images, but rather like the painter, with his observing eye

sees them outside himself; here there is already a surrender of the individual by turning into a

foreign nature. And indeed this phenomenon arises like an epidemic:9 an entire flock feels itself

enchanted in this way. The dithyramb is for this reason something essentially distinct from every

other choral song. The maidens, laurel branches in their hands, draw solemnly toward the temple

of Apollo and sing a processional song along the way, remaining who they are and retaining their

civic names: the dithyrambic chorus is a chorus of the transformed, for whom their civic past,

their social station is completely forgotten: they have become the timeless servants of their god,

living outside all social spheres. All other choral lyrics of the Hellenes are merely tremendous

aggrandizements of the individual Apollonian singer; while10 in a dithyramb a congregation of

unconscious actors stands before us who view themselves and each other as transformed.11

Enchantment is the presupposition of all dramatic art. In this enchantment the Dionysian

[62] reveler sees himself as satyr, and as satyr in turn he sees the god, i.e., he sees in his

55
transformation a new vision outside himself, as the Apollonian consummation of his own state.

With this new vision the drama is complete.

According to this discovery we are to understand Greek tragedy as a Dionysian chorus,

which ever again discharges itself anew in an Apollonian image world. The choral parts, with

which the tragedy is woven through, are also to a certain degree the maternal womb of the whole

so-called dialogue i.e., of the entire stage world, of the drama proper. In multiple successive

discharges this primordial ground of tragedy radiates the vision of the drama: insofar as it is very

much a dream appearance it is of an epic nature, while on the other hand however, as an

objectification of a Dionysian state, it presents not the Apollonian redemption in appearance, but

rather the opposite, the disintegration of the individual and its becoming one with primordial

being. In this, drama is12 the Apollonian embodiment of Dionysian insights and effects and it is

thus cut off from epic as though by an enormous chasm.

The chorus of Greek tragedy, the symbol of the entire excited Dionysian throng, is fully

explained in our interpretation. While we, given our familiarity with the place of the chorus on

the modern stage, especially the opera chorus, were not at all able to grasp how that tragic chorus

of the Greeks was supposed to be older, more original, indeed more important than the real

“action,” — as was so clearly handed down to us — and whereas we in turn could not reconcile

the traditional high importance and originality of the chorus with its being only composed of

lowly servile creatures, indeed at first of goat-like13 satyrs, and whereas for us the orchestra area

standing before the stage had always remained a riddle, we have now come to the insight that the

stage together with its action is fundamentally and originally only to be thought of as a vision,

while the sole “reality” is precisely [63] the chorus, which produces the vision from out of itself

and speaks through it with the entire symbolism of dance, tone and word. This chorus sees in its

56
vision its lord and master Dionysus and is thus eternally the serving chorus: it sees how the latter,

the god,14 suffers and exalts himself, and for this reason it does not itself act. In this thoroughly

servile position opposite the god, the chorus is nevertheless the highest, which is to say, the

Dionysian, expression of nature and thus, like it, delivers oracular and gnomic utterances in its

enthusiasm: as sharing in suffering, the chorus is at the same time wise, announcing the truth

from out of the heart of the world. Thus emerges that fantastic and repulsive-looking figure of

the wise and spirited satyr,15 who is at the same time “the stupid human” in opposition to the

god: a copy of nature and its strongest drives, indeed a symbol of the same and likewise the

proclaimer of its wisdom and art: musician, poet, dancer, spirit-seer in one person.16, 17

Dionysus, the authentic stage hero and focal point of the vision, is according to this

discovery and according to the tradition, first of all, in tragedy’s most ancient period, not truly

present, but is merely represented as present: i.e., originally the tragedy is only “chorus” and not

“drama.” The attempt will later be made to show the god as a real one and to present him as the

vision-like form visible to every eye, together with his transfiguring surroundings; with this,

“drama” in the narrow sense begins. Now the dithyrambic chorus is assigned the task of stirring

up the Dionysian mood of the audience to such a degree that, when the tragic hero appears on

stage, they somehow do not see a human in a misshapen mask, but instead a vision-like form,

born, as it were, from out of their own enchantment. Consider Admetus18 deep in thought

pondering his recently departed wife Alcestis, entirely consumed in mental contemplation of her

— when now a similarly shaped, similarly striding, shrouded female figure suddenly appears

being led toward him: [64] let us consider his suddenly shaking disquiet, his tempestuous

comparisons, his instinctive conviction — thus do we have an analogue to the sensation with

which the spectator excited in a Dionysian manner saw the god come striding across the stage,

57
with whose suffering he has already become one. Involuntarily he transfers the whole magical

image of the god trembling before his soul onto that masked figure and dissolves its reality, so to

speak, into a ghostly unreality. This is the Apollonian dream state, in which the world of the day

is veiled and a new world, clearer, more intelligible, more graspable than the other, and

nevertheless more like a shadow, births itself anew in constant change before our very eyes.

Accordingly we recognize in tragedy a sweeping stylistic opposition: language, color, mobility,

the dynamics of discourse divide into fully distinct spheres of expression, into the Dionysian

lyric of the chorus and on the other hand the Apollonian dream world of the stage. The

Apollonian appearances in which Dionysus is objectified are no longer “an eternal sea, a shifting

weave, an incandescent life,”19 as is the music of the chorus, no longer those forces merely felt

without poetically taking shape, in which the enthused servant of Dionysus detects the nearness

of his god: now, from the stage, the clarity and fixity of the epic configuration speaks to him,

now Dionysus no longer speaks through forces, but instead as epic hero, almost in the language

of Homer.

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 9.

Everything that comes to the surface in the Apollonian share of Greek tragedy, in the dialogue,

appears as simple, transparent, beautiful. In this sense, the dialogue is a copy of the Hellene

whose nature reveals itself in dance, for in dance the greatest force remains only in potential, but

betrays itself in the suppleness and voluptuousness of movement. Thus does the language [65] of

Sophocles’ heroes surprise us with its Apollonian determinacy and clarity, so much so that we

immediately delude ourselves into thinking we are gazing into the innermost ground of their

essence, even with some astonishment that the way to this ground is so short. Let us look away

for once from what comes to the surface and becomes visible in the character of the hero —

which is basically nothing more than a lighted image cast upon a dark wall i.e., appearance

through and through — let us instead enter into the myth that projects itself in these illuminated

reflections, then we will immediately experience a phenomenon, bearing an inverse relation to a

well-known optical one. If in a forceful attempt to stare into the sun, we turn away blinded, we

then have before our eyes dark colored spots as a sort of remedy: conversely, those bright

appearing images of the Sophoclean heroes, in short what is Apollonian about the mask, are the

necessary products of a glance into the interior of nature and its terror, like illuminating spots for

the healing of a gaze damaged by the gruesome night. Only in this sense may we believe

ourselves to have correctly grasped the serious and significant concept of “Greek cheerfulness”;1

even as we encounter on every path and byway today a false conception of this cheerfulness as a

state of safe contentment.

The most suffering figure of the Greek stage, the unfortunate Oedipus, has been

understood by Sophocles as a noble person who despite his wisdom is destined to madness and

wretchedness, but who in the end precisely by way of his monstrous suffering exudes a magical

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beneficent force about himself, which is still effective even after his passing. The noble person

does not sin, the profound poet wants to say to us: even if through his action every law, every

natural order, yes even the moral world should perish, it is precisely through this action that a

higher magic circle of effects is drawn, which grounds a new world on the ruins of the toppled

old one. That is what the [66] poet wants to say to us, insofar as he is also a religious thinker:2 as

poet he shows us first a wonderfully tied juridical knot, which the judge slowly, piece by piece,

unravels to his own detriment; the genuinely Hellenic joy at this dialectical dissolution is so great

that it lends a trait of superior cheerfulness to the entire work, which everywhere then dulls the

sharp edges of the ghastly conditions of this trial. In Oedipus at Colonus,3 we encounter this very

cheerfulness, but elevated into an endless transfiguration; over against the old man struck down

by an excess of wretchedness, who is exposed before everything he encounters purely as sufferer

— there stands the extraterrestrial cheerfulness descending from the divine sphere and indicating

to us that the4 hero in his purely passive comportment obtains his highest activity, which reaches

out far beyond his own lifespan, while the conscious scheming and striving of his earlier life had

led him only to passivity. Thus are the entwined juridical knots of the Oedipus fable, irresolvable

to the mortal eye, slowly disentangled — and the deepest human joy comes over us at this divine

counterpart to dialectic. If we are correct in this explanation of the poet, it can nevertheless

always be asked, whether thereby the content of the myth is exhausted: and here it becomes

evident that the poet’s entire conception is nothing other than that very luminous image which,

after a look into the abyss, ministering nature holds before us. Oedipus the murderer of his

father, the husband of his mother, Oedipus the solver of the riddle of the Sphinx! What does the

mysterious trinity of these fateful deeds tell us? It would offer a primordial, specifically Persian,5

folk belief that a wise mage could only be born out of incest: which we would directly have to

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interpret in regard to the riddle-solving and mother-wedding Oedipus, such that where by means

of auguring and magical forces the bonds of the present and the future, the rigid law of

individuation, and the proper spell of [67] nature on the whole are broken, there a monstrous

contrariety to nature — like incest in this case — must be presumed as cause; for how could one

compel nature to betray its secrets, if one had not victoriously opposed it i.e., by means of

something unnatural? This is the knowledge I see stamped in that horrible trinity of Oedipal fate:

the very one who solves the riddle of nature — that of the hybrid Sphinx — must also break the

holiest of natural orders as murderer of his father and husband of his mother. Yes, the myth

seems to whisper to us that wisdom and more specifically Dionysian wisdom is an abomination

contrary to nature, that he who by means of this knowledge would plunge nature into the abyss

of annihilation, must experience the dissolution of nature even within himself. “The pinnacle of

wisdom turns itself against the wise: Wisdom is a crime against nature”: the myth shouts out to

us such terrible propositions: the Hellenic poet, however, like a sunbeam touches the sublime and

frightening Memnon column6 of the myth, such that it suddenly begins to produce sound — in

Sophoclean melodies!

To the glory of passivity I now oppose the glory of activity, which lights up the

Prometheus of Aeschylus. What the thinker Aeschylus has to say to us here, what he

nevertheless as poet only allows us to intimate through its analogical image,7,8 that was made

known to us by the young Goethe, unveiled in the audacious words of his own Prometheus:

Here I sit, forming men

In my image,

A race to resemble me:

To suffer, to weep,

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 To enjoy, to be glad —

And never to heed you,

Like me!9

The human, enhanced into something titanic, wins for himself a culture and compels the gods to

ally with him [68] because in his very own wisdom he holds their existence and limitations in his

hands. What is most wonderful in that Prometheus poem, which according to its basic idea is the

genuine hymn of impiety, is nevertheless the deep Aeschylean pull towards justice: the

immeasurable sorrow of the brave “individual,” on the one hand, and the divine necessity, even

intimations of a twilight of the gods on the other, the power that compels those two worlds of

suffering into a reconciliation, into a metaphysical being-at-one — this all recalls very strongly

the central point and main thesis of the Aeschylean worldview, which sees Moira enthroned as

eternal justice above gods and humans. In light of the astonishing boldness with which

Aeschylus places the Olympian world upon his scales of justice, we must bring to mind the fact

that the profound Greek had an immovably firm substratum of metaphysical thinking in his

mysteries, and that he could discharge all his skeptical impulses on the Olympians. The Greek

artist in particular experienced in regard to these divinities a dark sense of reciprocal

dependence: and this very feeling is symbolized in the Prometheus of Aeschylus. The Titanic

artist found within himself the defiant belief that he could create humans and at least annihilate

the Olympian gods: and this on account of his higher wisdom, for which he admittedly was

compelled to atone with eternal suffering. The lordly “prowess” of the great genius, for which

even eternal sorrow was a small price to pay, that harsh pride of the artist — that is the content

and the soul of Aeschylean poetry, while Sophocles in his Oedipus inaugurates the victory song

of the holy man. But even the interpretation that Aeschylus gave to the myth does not fathom its

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astonishing and terrifying depths: far rather the pleasure the artist takes in becoming, the

cheerfulness of artistic creation despite every calamity, is merely a luminous image of cloud and

sky reflected upon a black sea of sadness. The Prometheus [69] saga is an original possession of

the Aryan10 community of people and a document of their talent for the profound-tragic, indeed

it may not be improbable that for the Aryan there dwells within this myth precisely the same

characteristic significance that the myth of the Fall has for the Semite,11 and that between the two

myths there exists a degree or relation as that between brother and sister.12 The presupposition of

the Prometheus myth is the extravagant value that naïve humanity conferred upon fire as the true

palladium13 of every ascendant culture: but the fact that the human reigns freely over fire and

does not merely receive it as a gift from heaven, as an incendiary lightning strike or the warming

touch of the sun, appeared to the tranquil primordial human as a sacrilege, a theft of divine

nature. And thus the first philosophical problem equally poses an embarrassing irresolvable

contradiction between human and god, dragging it like a boulder before the gate of every culture.

The best and the highest that humanity enjoys, it achieves through sacrilege and must then accept

the consequences, namely the whole flood of sorrow and tribulations with which the offended

divinities afflict the nobly, upwardly striving human race14 — must: a harsh thought which,

through the dignity conferred upon sacrilege, contrasts strangely with the Semitic myth of the

Fall in which curiosity, deceitful pretense, seductiveness, lewdness, in short a series of chiefly

feminine affections would be seen as the origin of evil. What distinguishes the Aryan

representation is the sublime insight into active sin as the proper Promethean virtue: whereby at

the same time the ethical subterranean ground of pessimistic tragedy is found, as the justification

for human evil, and indeed for human guilt as well as for the sorrow incurred thereby. The

calamity in the essence of things — which the [70] tranquil Aryan tends not to quibble away —

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the contradiction in the heart of the world reveals itself to him as a muddle of different worlds

e.g., a divine one and a human one, both of which are in the right individually, but must suffer

for their individuation as one next to another. With the heroic urge of the individual toward the

universal, with the attempt to step beyond the spell of individuation and to want to be the one

world essence itself, he endures in himself the primordial contradiction hidden in things i.e., he

commits sacrilege and suffers. Just as for the Aryans sacrilege is understood as male, while for

the Semites sin is understood as female, so is the primordial sacrilege committed by a man, the

primordial sin by a woman. Incidentally the warlocks’ chorus says:

We do not take that so precisely:

What woman does with a thousand steps;

However much they might hurry,

Man does it in just one leap.15

Whoever understands that innermost core of the Prometheus saga — namely the necessity of

sacrilege imposed upon the Titanically striving individual — he must also at the same time

experience what is un-Apollonian in this pessimistic representation; for Apollo wants to bring

calm to individual beings, precisely by drawing boundaries between them and by always again

reminding them of this, as of the world’s holiest laws, with his demand for self-knowledge and

measure. So that given this Apollonian tendency the form does not stiffen into Egyptian rigidity

and coldness,16 so that in the effort to stipulate the path and region for the individual waves the

movement of the whole sea does not die down, time and again the high tide of the Dionysian had

to destroy all those small circles17 in which the unilaterally Apollonian “will” had sought to

captivate Hellenism. That suddenly swelling flood of the Dionysian then takes upon its back the

particular small waves of the individuals, like Prometheus’s brother, [71] the Titan Atlas,18 the

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earth. This Titanic urge to become the Atlas of all individuals, so to speak, and to bear this with

broad back higher and higher, farther and farther, is the commonality between the Promethean

and the Dionysian. The Aeschylean Prometheus is in this regard a Dionysian mask, while in that

above-mentioned deep straining toward justice, Aeschylus divulges19 to anyone of insight his

paternal descent from Apollo, the god of individuation and just limitation. And thus the double

essence of the Aeschylean Prometheus, his simultaneously Dionysian and Apollonian nature,

could20 be expressed in a conceptual formula: “All that exists is both just and unjust and equally

justified in both.”

This is your world! A so-called world! —21

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 10.

There is an unassailable tradition attesting to the fact that Greek tragedy in its earliest form had

only the suffering of Dionysus as its subject matter and that for a long period of time Dionysus

himself was the sole hero of the stage. But with the very same certainty it could be claimed that

up through Euripides, Dionysus never ceased being the tragic hero, and all the famous figures of

the Greek stage, Prometheus, Oedipus, etc., are instead merely masks of that original hero,

Dionysus. That there is a divinity lurking behind all these masks is the only essential reason for

the frequently astonishing, yet typical “ideality” of those famous figures. It has been claimed, I

know not by whom, that all individuals as individuals are comical and thereby untragic:1 from

this it could be gathered that the Greeks were not at all able to tolerate individuals upon the

tragic stage. In fact this seems to have been the way they felt: so deeply grounded in the Hellenic

essence is that Platonic differentiation and appraisal of the “Idea” as opposed to the “idol” [72]

or the copy.2 Availing ourselves of Plato’s terminology, we would more or less have to speak of

the tragic figures of the Hellenic stage thusly: the3 one truly real Dionysus appears in a multitude

of figures, in the mask of a battling hero and thus entangled in the net of the individual will. In

the way the appearing god now speaks and acts, he resembles an erring striving suffering

individual: and4 that he appears at all with this epic determinacy and clarity, is the effect of the

dream interpreter Apollo, who by means of that analogical appearance construes for the chorus

its Dionysian condition. In truth however that hero is the suffering Dionysus of the mysteries,

that god who himself undergoes the sufferings of individuation, with wondrous myths recounting

how as a boy he was dismembered by the Titans and then worshipped in that condition as

Zagreus:5 thus indicating that this dismemberment, the actual Dionysian suffering, would be like

the transformation into air, water, earth and fire, and that we therefore would have to view the

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condition of individuation as the wellspring and primal cause of all suffering, as something

condemnable in itself. From the smiles of this Dionysus, the Olympian gods are born, from his

tears, human beings. In his existence as a dismembered god, Dionysus bears the dual nature of a

gruesome and uncouth daemon6 as well as a mild and gentle ruler. The hope of the epopts7 was

for a rebirth of Dionysus, which we now have to conceive ominously as the end of individuation:

the roaring jubilant song of the epopts rang out toward this coming third Dionysus. And in this

hope alone a ray of joy shines down upon the features of a world shattered into individuals: myth

represents this in the figure of Demeter, sunk in eternal sorrow, who rejoices when she hears for

the first time that she might give birth to Dionysus once again. In the views introduced above,

we already have [73] all the elements of a profound and pessimistic worldview, and so too the

mystery doctrine of tragedy: the fundamental recognition of the oneness of everything extant, the

conception of individuation as the origin of all evil, art8 as the joyful hope that the spell of

individuation might be broken, as the intimation of a restored oneness. —

It was indicated earlier that Homeric epic is the poetry of Olympian culture, with which it

sang its own victory song over the terrors of the battle against the Titans. Now, under the

overpowering influence of tragic poetry, the Homeric myths are transformatively born anew and

they show, in this metempsychosis,9 that Olympian culture too has since been conquered by a

still deeper worldview. The defiant Titan Prometheus announced to his Olympian tormentor that

one day his rule would be threatened by the greatest danger, should he not ally himself with him

at the proper time. In Aeschylus, we discern the alliance of the terrified Zeus, anxious at the

prospect of his end, with the Titan. Thus was the earlier age of the Titans subsequently drawn out

again from Tartarus10 and into the light. The philosophy of wild and naked nature looks upon the

myths of the Homeric world as they dance past with the undisguised mien of truth: they blanch,

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they tremble before the fulgurant eye of this goddess — until they compel the mighty fist of the

Dionysian artist into the service of this new divinity. Dionysian truth takes over the entire region

of myth as the symbol of its knowledge and expresses this partly in the public cult of tragedy and

partly in the secret activities of the dramatic festival of the mysteries, though always beneath the

old mythical cover. What was the force that freed Prometheus from his vulture and transformed

the myth into a vehicle of Dionysian wisdom? This is the Heraclean force of music: which,

brought to its highest appearance in [74] tragedy, knows how to interpret myth with a new and

more profound significance; something we already had to characterize as music’s most powerful

ability. For it is the lot of every myth to creep gradually into the confines of a purportedly

historical reality and to be treated by some later time as a unique fact with historical pretensions:

and the Greeks, with acumen and caprice, were already fully on the way to recoining their entire

mythical and youthful dream into a historical-pragmatic youthful history. For this is the manner

in which religions tend to die off: namely, when the mythical presumptions of a religion under

the strict, intellectual gaze of an orthodox dogmatism are systematized as a fixed sum of

historical events, and when one anxiously begins to defend the credibility of myths, but bristles

against every natural continuance and proliferation of the same, therefore when the feeling for

myth dies off and in its place steps religion’s claim to a historical foundation.11 This dying myth

is now seized upon by the newborn genius of Dionysian music: and in its hand it blooms once

again, with colors it had never yet shown, and with a scent that arouses a yearning presentiment

of a metaphysical world. After this final efflorescence it collapses, its leaves wither, and soon the

mocking Lucians of antiquity snatch after its discolored and desiccated blossoms, scattered to the

four winds. Through tragedy, myth arrives at its deepest content, its most expressive form; once

68
more it raises itself up, like a wounded hero, and the whole excess of force, together with the

wise calm of one dying, burns in its eyes with a final, forceful glow.

What did you want, blaspheming Euripides, as you sought to compel this dying myth

once again into your forced service? It died by your violent hands: and now you needed a

counterfeit, masked myth that like the ape of Heracles only knew how to adorn itself in ancient

splendor.12 And just as myth died by your hand, the genius of music died by your hand as well:

even as you, greedily snatching, wished to plunder all the gardens of music, you only ever

arrived at a music that was counterfeit and masked. And because you abandoned Dionysus, so

did Apollo abandon you as well; flush every passion out from its lair and capture it in your

circle, file and sharpen well a sophistic dialectic for your heroes’ speeches — even your heroes

have merely imitated, masked passions and deliver only imitated, masked speeches.13

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 11.

Greek1 tragedy perished otherwise than all of its older sister art-forms: it died by suicide, as a

result of an irresolvable conflict, and thus tragically, while all those others in old age faded away

into the most beautiful and calmest of deaths. Indeed if it accords with a happy natural state to

depart from this life, without strain and leaving behind a fine posterity, the end of those older art-

forms presents us with just such a happy natural state: they sink slowly under, and before their

dying gaze there stands already their more beautiful offspring, raising its head impatiently with a

brave gesture. By contrast, with the death of Greek tragedy there emerged everywhere an

enormous, deeply felt void; as when Greek boatmen in the time of Tiberius passing a lonely

island heard the shattering cry, “the great Pan is dead”:2 there thus rang forth now like a pained

and plaintive cry throughout the Hellenic world3: “Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself has been lost

along with it! Away, away with you stunted, emaciated epigones! Away to Hades, where for

once you can eat your fill of the crumbs of your former masters!”

Now however, as another new art-form blossomed, a form that honored tragedy as its

predecessor and mistress, one perceived there with horror that it certainly bore its mother’s

features, albeit those very ones that she displayed in her long death struggle. This death struggle

of tragedy was fought by Euripides; that later art-form is known as New Attic Comedy.4 In it, the

degenerate form of tragedy lived on, as a monument of its exceedingly laborious and violent

passing away.

Given this context, the passionate affection that the poet of New Comedy felt toward

Euripides is understandable; so that we no longer find strange the wish of Philemon, who wanted

to be hanged at once, simply in order to be able to visit Euripides in the underworld: if he could

only be completely convinced that the deceased would still be possessed of his understanding.5

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In all brevity and without any claim to saying anything exhaustive, if one wants to sketch that

which Euripides has in common with Menander and Philemon and what so excited them as a

model: it suffices to say that the spectator was brought onto the stage by Euripides. Whoever has

recognized the material from which the Promethean tragedians before Euripides formed their

heroes and how far from them lay the intention of bringing a faithful6 mask of reality onto the

stage, he will also be clear about the entirely deviant tendency of Euripides. Through him the

human of everyday life shoved his way from out of the audience onto the stage, the7 mirror in

which previously only the grandest and bravest traits were expressed, now exhibited that

embarrassing fidelity that conscientiously reproduces even the miscarried lines of nature.

Odysseus, the older art’s typical Hellene,8 in the hands of the newer poets now sank into the

figure of Graeculus,9 who as good-natured, mischievous house-slave henceforth stood at the

center of dramatic interest. What counts in Euripides’s favor in the [77] Frogs10 of Aristophanes,

that by means of his home remedy he had freed tragic art from its pompous corpulence, is

detectible above all in his tragic heroes. In essence, the spectator now saw and heard his

doppelgänger on the Euripidean stage and rejoiced, that he knew how to speak so well. But it did

not stop with this joy: one even learned how to speak from Euripides and he himself boasts of

just this in his competition with Aeschylus: how now through him the people have learned to

observe, to act and to draw consequences skillfully and with the shrewdest sophistication.

Through this turnabout in public speech, he by and large made New Comedy possible. For from

now on, it was no longer a mystery how and with which lines the everyday could step onto the

stage. The bourgeois mediocrity upon which Euripides built all his political hopes was now

given voice, where hitherto the character of speech had been determined by the demigod in

tragedy and the drunken satyr or demi-human11 in comedy. And thus the Aristophanic Euripides

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emphatically prides himself on having presented general, well known, everyday life and its

pursuits, about which anyone would be able to judge. If now the entire masses were to

philosophize,12 administer land and wealth with unheard of cleverness and conduct their own

court cases,13 so would this be his reward and the consequence of the wisdom he had injected

into the people.

New Comedy could now apply itself to just such prepared and enlightened masses, for

whom Euripides had to a certain extent become their chorus master; only that this time the

chorus of spectators had to be trained. As soon as they were trained to sing in the Euripidean

mode, that14 chess-like species of theater arose, New Comedy with its continual triumphs of

cleverness and craftiness. Euripides however — the chorus master — was praised incessantly:

yes one would have killed oneself in order [78] to learn still more from him, if one had not

known that the tragic poet was just as dead as tragedy itself. With this, however, the Hellene

gave up the belief in his immortality, not only the belief in an ideal past, but the belief in an ideal

future as well. The saying from the well-known epitaph, “in old age, frivolous, capricious,”15

applies as well to the old-age of Hellenism. The opportune moment, the wisecrack, frivolity, a

good mood are its highest divinities; the fifth estate, that of the slaves, now comes to power, at

least in sentiment: and if now there may still be any talk of “Greek cheerfulness,” then it is the

cheerfulness of the slave, who knows no responsibility over anything difficult, strives for nothing

great, and values nothing past or to come more highly than what is present. It was this semblance

of “Greek cheerfulness” that so scandalized the profound and fearful natures of the first four

centuries of Christendom: this womanly flight from the serious and terrible, this cowardly self-

satisfaction in comfortable enjoyments not only seemed to them despicable, but even a genuine

anti-Christian disposition. And it is to be ascribed to this influence that, over centuries of the

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ongoing contemplation of Greek antiquity, it retains with almost unconquerable tenacity that16

roseate shade of cheerfulness — as if there had17 never been a sixth century with its birth of

tragedy, its mysteries, its Pythagoras18 and Heraclitus, indeed as if the artworks of the great age

had never even existed, which — each on their own — can in no way be explained on the basis

of such a feeble and slavish pleasure in existence and cheerfulness, and which point to a

completely different worldview as the ground of their existence.

As it was just declared that Euripides brought the spectator onto the stage, in order

thereby to first truly enable the spectator to judge the drama, it may seem as though the older

tragic art had not escaped [79] poor relations with the spectator: and one might be tempted to

praise as an advance over Sophocles the radical tendency of Euripides that aimed at instituting an

appropriate relationship between the artwork and the public. But “public” is only a word and

absolutely not itself a homogeneous and enduring value. And whence should the obligation arise

for the artist to accommodate a force whose only strength lies in its numbers? And if he, given

his gift and his purpose, feels himself elevated over every single one of these spectators, how

could he feel any more respect for the collective expression of all these inferior capacities than

for the relatively most19 gifted single spectator? In truth, no Greek artist handled his public with

more audacity and self-satisfaction his whole life long than this Euripides: he who, even after the

masses had thrown themselves at his feet, in sublime defiance of his own tendency, publicly

flouted that very tendency with which he had won over the masses. If this genius had had even

the tiniest bit of reverence for the pandemonium of the public, he would have collapsed under the

hammer blows of his failures long before middle age. With this consideration, we see that our

claim that Euripides brought the spectator onto the stage in order to make the spectator truly

capable of judgment, was merely provisional, and that we must search after a deeper

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understanding of his tendency. Quite to the contrary, it is everywhere understood that over the

course of their lives and indeed well beyond, Aeschylus and Sophocles stood in full possession

of the people’s favor, such that with these predecessors of Euripides one simply cannot speak of

poor relations between the artwork and the public. What drove this artist, richly endowed and

constantly compelled to create, so violently from the path lit by the sun of the greatest poetic

names and the cloudless sky [80] of the people’s favor? What particular regard for the spectator

led him to cross the spectator? How could he from high regard for his public — disregard his

public?

Euripides felt — and this is the solution to the riddle just posed — that as a poet he was

wholly superior to the masses, but not to two of his spectators: he brought the masses onto the

stage, but these two spectators he honored as the only judges and masters capable of judging all

of his art: following their instructions and exhortations he transferred the whole world of

feelings, passions and experiences,20 which until then had stationed itself on the spectator

benches as an invisible chorus for every festival performance, into the souls of his stage heroes,

he gave into their demands, as he sought for these characters new words and a new tone as well,

in their voices alone did he hear valid judgements about his creation as much as encouragements

promising victory, even if he once again found himself condemned by the justice of the public.

Of these two spectators one is — Euripides himself, Euripides as thinker,21 not as poet.

Of him, as of Lessing, one could say that the extraordinary abundance of his critical talent, if it

did not generate a productively artistic secondary drive, it continually stimulated it. With this

gift, with all the brightness and agility of his critical thinking, Euripides had sat in the theater and

strained to recognize in the masterpieces of his great predecessors, as though in darkened

paintings, feature after feature, line after line. Then and there he encountered what could not

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have been unexpected for one initiated into the deeper mysteries of Aeschylean tragedy:22 he

perceived something incommensurable in every feature and in every line, a certain deceptive

determinacy and at the same time an enigmatic depth, indeed a backdrop of endlessness. The

clearest figure always still had a comet’s tail to it, which seemed to point [81] into the uncertain,

the unilluminable. That same twilight lay over the construction of the drama, especially over the

significance of the chorus. And how dubious remained for him the solution of ethical problems!

How questionable the treatment of myths! How imbalanced the distribution of happiness and

unhappiness! Even in the language of the older tragedy there was much objectionable for him, or

at least enigmatic; in particular he found too much pomp in simple relations, too many tropes and

monstrosities for such plain characters. So he sat in the theater, brooding uneasily, and he, the

spectator, confessed to himself that he did not understand his great predecessors. But since

understanding counted as the genuine root of all enjoyment and creativity for him,23 he had to

ask and look around to see whether anyone else might think as he did and might likewise

acknowledge that incommensurability. The many, however, and among them the best individuals

had only a suspicious smile for him; but no one could explain to him why despite his concerns

and objections the great masters should be in the right. And in this agonizing situation he found

the other spectator who could not comprehend tragedy and therefore did not respect it. In league

with this individual, coming out of his isolation, he could risk initiating the tremendous struggle

against the artworks of Aeschylus and Sophocles — not with polemics, but as a dramatic poet,

who placed over against the inherited tradition his own conception of tragedy. —

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 12.

Before we refer to this other spectator by name, let us pause here a moment, in order to call to

mind that impression of ambivalence and incommensurability at the very essence of Aeschylean

tragedy depicted previously. Let us consider our own alienation from the chorus and the tragic

hero of that tragedy, both of which we were able to accord with our customs just as little [82] as

with the tradition — until we rediscover that doubleness itself as origin and essence of Greek

tragedy, as the expression of two interwoven artistic drives, the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

To cut that original and omnipotent Dionysian element out of tragedy and to erect it

purely and anew upon an un-Dionysian1 art, morality and worldview — this is the tendency of

Euripides, now unveiled for us in bright light.2

Euripides himself, in the evening of his life, set forth in a myth the question of the value

and the significance of this tendency most emphatically for his contemporaries. Is the Dionysian

even allowed to exist? Is it not to be violently eradicated from the Hellenic soil? Certainly, the

poet tells us, if only it were possible: but the god Dionysus is too powerful; the most reasonable

opponent — like Pentheus in the Bacchae3 — will be unsuspectingly enchanted by him and

afterwards in this enchantment run to his doom. The judgment of the two old men Cadmus and

Tiresias seems to be the judgment of the aged poet as well: the reflection of the most clever

individuals would not overthrow those old folk-traditions, those of the eternally self-propagating

worship of Dionysus, indeed it behooves one, over against such wondrous forces, to make show

of at least a diplomatically cautious participation: whereby it would always still be possible,

however, that the god might take4 offense at such lukewarm participation and ultimately

transform5 the diplomat — like Cadmus here — into a dragon.6 This is what we hear from a poet

who resisted the Dionysian with heroic force his whole life long — only to conclude his life’s

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journey with a glorification of his opponent and suicide,7 like someone suffering from vertigo,

who merely to escape the horrifying and no longer bearable vortex throws himself off a tower.

That tragedy is a protest against the [83] realization of his tendency; alas, but it had already been

realized!8 The miraculous had occurred: as the poet recanted, his tendency had already won.

Dionysus had already been banished from the tragic stage and indeed by a daemonic power

speaking through Euripides. Even Euripides was in a certain sense merely a mask: the divinity

that spoke through him was not Dionysus, nor was it Apollo, but rather a wholly newborn

daemon, called Socrates.9 This is the new opposition: the Dionysian and the Socratic, and the

artwork of Greek tragedy perished by it. If10 then Euripides also sought to console us with his

recanting, he did not succeed: the most majestic temple lay in ruins; what use for us is the

destroyer’s lamentation and his confession that it had been the most beautiful of all temples?

And even if as punishment Euripides was transformed into a dragon by the artistic judges of

every age — who would be satisfied by this pitiful compensation?

We are drawing nearer now to that Socratic tendency, with which Euripides battled and

defeated Aeschylean tragedy.

What goal — we must now ask ourselves — could Euripides’s plan to ground drama

solely upon the un-Dionysian11 have had, even in its most ideal execution? What form of drama

still remained, if it were not born of the womb of music, in that mysterious twilight of the

Dionysian? Only the dramatized epic: in this region of Apollonian art the tragic effect is of

course no longer attainable. Here, it does not concern the content of the events portrayed: indeed

I would like to claim that it would have been impossible for Goethe in his planned Nausicaä,12 to

render the suicide of that idyllic being — which was supposed to occupy the fifth act — in a

tragically gripping way; so extraordinary is the power of the epic-Apollonian, that before our

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eyes [84] it magically transforms even the most horrifying of things with that pleasure in

semblance and redemption through semblance. The poet of dramatized epic is as little able to

meld with his own images as the epic rhapsode: he is only ever calmly unmoved with a wide-

eyed perceptive contemplation that sees the images before himself. The actor in this dramatized

epic remains fundamentally ever still a rhapsode; the consecration of inner dreaming lays upon

all his actions such that he is never wholly an actor.13

How does the Euripidean play now relate to this ideal of the Apollonian drama? As the

younger rhapsode to that solemn rhapsode of ancient times,14 when he describes his essence in

Plato’s Ion as follows: “When I say something sad, my eyes fill with tears; but if what I am

saying is terrible and dreadful, then with a shudder the hair on my flesh stands on end, and my

heart pounds.”15 Here we no longer notice anything of that epic getting lost in semblance, of the

affectless cool of the true actor, who at the very height of his activity is wholly semblance and

pleasure in semblance. Euripides is the actor with a beating heart, with his hair standing on end;

as Socratic thinker he outlines a plan, as passionate actor he carries it out. Neither in the

outlining nor in the performing is he a pure artist. The Euripidean drama is thus a simultaneously

cool and fiery thing, equally capable of both freezing and burning; it is impossible for it to reach

the Apollonian effect of epic, while on the other hand it has detached itself as much as possible

from the Dionysian elements, and now, in order to have an effect at all, needs new means of

excitation, which can then no longer lie in the two individual artistic drives of the Apollonian

and the Dionysian. These means of excitation are cool paradoxical thoughts — in place of

Apollonian contemplations — and fiery affects — in place of Dionysian delights — and indeed

thoughts and affects that are most realistically imitated16 and have in no way been dipped in the

aether of art.

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 [85] If we have thus recognized well enough that Euripides was not at all successful in

his attempt to found drama solely on the Apollonian, that his un-Dionysian17 tendency had much

more strayed into one that was unnatural and inartistic, then we are now permitted to approach

the essence of aesthetic Socratism even more closely; the highest law of which reads something

like: “everything must be reasonable, if it is to be beautiful”; as a parallel to the Socratic

principle “only one with knowledge is virtuous.”18 With this canon19 in hand Euripides measured

every detail and rectified it according to this principle: the language, the characters, the

dramaturgical construction, the choral music. What we so often tend to count a poetic flaw and a

regression in Euripides, as compared with Sophoclean tragedy, is mostly the product of that

penetrating critical process, that audacious reasonability. The Euripidean prologue may serve as

an example for us of the productivity of that rationalistic method. Nothing could be more

contrary to our own stage techniques than the prologue in Euripidean drama. That an individual

person should appear at the opening of the play and explain who he is, what preceded the action,

what has occurred up until now, indeed what will occur in the course of the play, a modern

dramatic poet would describe as a wanton and inexcusable relinquishing of the effect of

suspense. Indeed, one knows everything that will happen; who will want to wait and see if this

really happens? — for here what takes place is in any event not the exciting relation of a

prophetic dream to a later emerging reality. Euripides thought entirely otherwise. The effect of

tragedy never depended on epic suspense, on the stimulating uncertainty about what will happen

next and afterward: it depended much more on those great rhetorical-lyrical scenes, in which the

passion and the dialectic of the principal heroes swell up into a broad and powerful torrent.

Everything prepares one for pathos, not for action: and what is not a preparation for pathos, [86]

that counts as reprehensible. That which most strongly impedes one’s pleasurable surrender to

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such scenes, however, is a missing link for the listener, a gap in the fabric of the preceding story;

as long as the listener must still figure out what the significance of this or that person is, what

presuppositions underlie this or that conflict of inclinations and intentions, his full immersion in

the suffering and actions of the main characters, his breathless sympathizing and fearing along

with them is not yet possible. Aeschylean-Sophoclean tragedy deployed the most thoughtful of

artistic means so that in the opening scenes, almost accidentally, all of the threads necessary for

understanding are placed in the hands of the spectator: a feature exhibiting that noble artistry

which masks, so to speak, what is formally necessary and allows it to appear as accidental.

Euripides anyway presumed to have noticed that during those opening scenes the spectator

would be in such a peculiar discomfort, trying to work out the calculation of the back story, such

that the poetically beautiful elements and the pathos of the exposition were lost on him. For this

reason, he even placed the prologue before the exposition and put it in the mouth of a person to

whom one could give one’s trust: a divinity often had to guarantee the course of the tragedy

somewhat for the audience and remove every doubt in the reality of the myth: in a similar way,

Descartes sought to prove the reality of the empirical world by appealing to the truthfulness of

god and his20 incapacity for deception. Euripides needs this same divine truthfulness once again

at the close of his dramas, in order to secure the future of his heroes for his audience; this is the

task of the notorious deus ex machina.21 Between that epic preview and forecast lies the

dramatic-lyrical present, the proper “drama.”

Thus Euripides, above all22 as poet, is the echo of his own conscious understanding; and

it is precisely this that grants him such a notable position in the history of Greek art. [87] In view

of his critical-productive creativity he often must have been so emboldened as to suppose he

could make the opening of the Anaxagorean text live in drama, the first words of which read: “in

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the beginning everything was together; then came Mind and created order.”23 And if Anaxagoras

with his “Nous” appeared among the philosophers as the only sober man among noisy drunks,

then Euripides too might have construed his own relation to the other tragic poets through a

similar image. As long as Nous, the sole orderer and ruler of everything, was still excluded from

artistic creation, everything was still together in a chaotic primordial stew; thus must Euripides

have judged, thus must he as the first “sober” poet have condemned those “drunken” ones. What

Sophocles said of Aeschylus, that he did what was right, albeit unconsciously,24 was certainly

not said in a Euripidean vein: who would only have accepted that Aeschylus created something

wrong because he created unconsciously. Even the divine Plato speaks almost always of the

creative ability of the poet only ironically, insofar as this is not a conscious insight, and equates it

with the talent of the soothsayer and dream interpreter; as though the poet is incapable of

poetizing unless he becomes unconscious, and no longer possessed of understanding.25 Euripides

undertook, as Plato had also done, to show the world a counter-example to the “unintelligent”

poet; his aesthetic basic principle “everything must be conscious, if it is to be beautiful,” is, as I

said, the parallel to the Socratic principle, “everything must be conscious, if it is to be good.”

Accordingly we may count Euripides as the poet of aesthetic Socratism. Socrates was however

that second spectator, who did not grasp Old Tragedy and thus did not revere it; in league with

him Euripides dared to be the herald of a new kind of artistic production. If Old Tragedy

perished of this, then aesthetic Socratism is the murderous principle: insofar as the battle was

directed against the Dionysian in the older art, [88] we recognize in Socrates the opponent of

Dionysus, the new Orpheus,26 who rises up against Dionysus and, though fated to be torn apart

by the maenads of the Athenian court, nevertheless compelled the overpowering god himself into

81
flight: who,27 as when he fled from King Lycurgus28 of the Edoni, has taken refuge in the depths

of the sea, namely in the mythical floods of a secret cult gradually overrunning the entire world.

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 13.

That Socrates might have a close relation to the tendency of Euripides did not escape his ancient

contemporaries; and the most telling expression of this fortuitous intuition is the story1

circulating in Athens that Euripides needed Socrates’ help with his poetizing. Both names were

mentioned in the same breath by those adherents of the “good old days,” whenever it was a

matter of enumerating the demagogues of the present: it would be due to2 their influence that the

square old Marathonian fitness in body and soul3 increasingly fell victim to a dubious

enlightenment, with a progressive atrophying of corporeal and spiritual forces. Aristophanic

comedy tended to speak of these men in this tone of half indignation, half disdain, to the horror

of those more modern ones, who were indeed happy to abandon Euripides, but could not

sufficiently express their surprise that Socrates should appear in Aristophanes as the first and

highest sophist, as the mirror and quintessence of all sophistical aspirations: for this they were

granted the sole consolation of publicly ridiculing Aristophanes himself as the dissolute lying

Alcibiades of poesy. On this point without defending Aristophanes’ profound instincts from such

attacks, I will continue by demonstrating the close connection between Socrates and Euripides by

appeal to ancient [89] sentiment; and in that sense in particular it is to be remembered that

Socrates, as the opponent of tragic art, refrained from attending tragedies, and only when a new

play of Euripides was being performed did he take his place among the spectators. Most famous

of all, however, is the way the two names were bound closely together in the proclamation of the

Delphic oracle, which designated Socrates as the wisest among humans, passing the judgment at

the same time that second place in this competition over wisdom would go to Euripides.4

Sophocles was named as the third step in this ladder; he who could boast that, as opposed

to Aeschylus, he did what was right precisely because he knew what the right was. Obviously it

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is just the degree of clarity of this knowing that distinguished these three men together as the

three “wise ones” of their time.

But the most pointed words on behalf of the new and unprecedentedly high value being

placed on knowledge and insight were those spoken by Socrates, when he found that he was the

only one who understood himself to know nothing; while he, on his critical rambles through

Athens, calling on the greatest statesmen, orators, poets and artists, met everywhere only the

pretense of knowledge. With astonishment, he recognized that all these famous people were

without correct and certain insight even about their own professions and pursued these only out

of instinct. “Only out of instinct”: with this expression we touch upon the heart and center of the

Socratic tendency. With it Socratism condemned the existing art as much as the existing ethics:

wherever he directed his examining gaze, he saw lack of insight and the power of delusion and

concluded from this lack the inner perverseness and reprehensibility of what lay before him.

Proceeding from this one point Socrates believed that existence had to be corrected: with an

irreverent and superior mien, he, he alone, as the harbinger of a culture, art and morals of an

entirely different sort, entered into a world, [90] to touch in reverence even the hem of which we

would count as our greatest happiness.

This is the monstrous apprehension which takes hold of us, every time we are faced with

Socrates, and which entices us again and again to consider the sense and intention of this most

questionable phenomenon of antiquity. Who would risk single-handedly negating the Greek

essence, which, as Homer, Pindar, and Aeschylus, as Phidias, as Pericles, as Pythia and

Dionysus, as the deepest abyss and the highest height is assured of our marveling adoration?

What demonic force would have the audacity to pour this magic potion into the dust? Which

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demigod is it to whom the spiritual chorus of humanity’s most noble must call out: “Woe! Woe!

You have destroyed it, the beautiful world, with a powerful fist; it topples, it falls apart!”5

One key to the essence of Socrates is provided us by that wonderful phenomenon, which

is termed “Socrates’ daemon.” In certain situations, where his tremendous understanding

wavered, he gained a firm hold through a divine voice that expressed itself at such moments.

When it comes, this voice always admonishes. This instinctive wisdom only shows itself in this

entirely abnormal nature, so as to confront conscious recognition here and there and impede it.

But while with all productive people instinct is precisely the creative-affirmative force, and it is

consciousness that behaves critically and admonishingly: with Socrates instinct becomes critic

and consciousness, creator — a true monstrosity per defectum!6 And indeed here we perceive a

monstrous defectus in every mystical disposition, such that Socrates would have to be designated

specifically a non-mystic, in whom the logical nature through a superfetation7 is just as

excessively developed as that instinctive wisdom is for the mystic. On the other hand, however,

the logical drive appearing in Socrates was utterly barred from turning [91] against itself; in this

unbridled outpouring it shows a natural might, such as we encounter with shuddering

astonishment in only the greatest of all instinctive forces. Whoever in the Platonic writings

detects even a whiff of that divine naiveté and certainty of the Socratic way of life, he also senses

how the monstrous drive wheel of logical Socratism is in motion, as it were, behind Socrates,

and how this must be viewed through Socrates as though through a shadow. The fact that he

himself, however, had some inkling of this relationship is expressed in the dignified seriousness

with which he everywhere asserted his divine calling,8 even before his judges. It was at base just

as impossible to contradict him in this as it was to deem beneficial his instinct-dissolving

influence. In view of this irresolvable conflict, when he was at last called before the forum of the

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Greek state, only a single form of punishment was offered, exile; as something thoroughly

puzzling, uncategorizable, unclarifiable, it would have been permitted to show him to the city

limits, and posterity could never have rightly found the Athenians guilty of a shameful deed.

That death, however, was pronounced upon him, and not merely banishment, this Socrates

himself appears to have accepted with complete clarity and without the natural shudder before

death: he went to death with that calm which he exhibited, according to Plato’s description,9 as

he, the last of the revelers, left the symposium in the early grey of morning in order to begin a

new day; meanwhile, his sleeping table companions were left behind, on the benches and on the

ground, to dream of Socrates, the true eroticist. The dying Socrates was the new, never before

seen ideal of the noble Greek youth: above all, of that typical Hellenic youngster, Plato, who

prostrated his enthusiast’s soul before this image.10

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 14.

Let us now think of that one great Cyclops eye of Socrates turned upon tragedy, that eye, in

which the fair delusion of artistic enthusiasm has never glowed — let us think of how it was

denied to that eye to gaze in appreciation into the Dionysian abysses — what must it actually

have caught sight of in the “sublime and much vaunted”1 tragic art, as Plato deemed it?

Something quite irrational, with causes that appeared to be without effects and effects that

appeared to be without causes, and at the same time the whole of it so colorful and manifold, that

it would have to repel any temperate kind of disposition, though for excitable and sensitive souls

it would provide a dangerous tinder. We know that the only genre of poetic art grasped by him

was the Aesopean fable:2 and this occurred no doubt with that same smiling accommodation with

which3 the good and honorable Gellert sings his praise of poetry in the fable of the bees and the

hen:

“You see in me what it is useful for,

That, to him who possesses little understanding,

The truth may be told through an image.”4

Now, however, for Socrates tragic art did not even once appear “to tell the truth”: and

independent of that, it addresses itself to “him who possesses little understanding,” thus not to

philosophers: a twofold reason for staying far from it.5 Like Plato, he had counted it among the

flattering arts, which present only what is agreeable, not what is useful, and thus he required of

his followers abstinence and strict separation from such unphilosophical excitements;6 with such

success that the young tragic poet Plato burnt his poetry straight away, in order to be able to

become a student of Socrates.7 But wherever unconquerable conditions battle against the

Socratic maxims, the force of the latter, together with the impact [93] of that monstrous

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character, was always still great enough to compel poesy itself into new and hitherto unknown

positions.

An example for this is the just mentioned Plato: he, who in the condemnation of tragedy

and of art in general certainly did lag behind the naïve cynicism of his master, but indeed out of

full artistic necessity had to produce an art form that was intrinsically related to those very

existing art forms he had dismissed. The central charge Plato brought against the older art — that

it was the imitation of a simulacrum, thus would belong to a sphere still lower than that of the

empirical world — above all was not to be directed against his new artwork: and thus we see

Plato striving to go beyond reality and present the idea lying at the base of that pseudo-reality.

With this, however, the thinker Plato takes a detour to precisely there, where he as poet had

always been at home and from where Sophocles and the entire older art solemnly protested

against such an objection. If tragedy had absorbed all previous genres of art into itself, the same

also holds of the Platonic dialogues though in an eccentric sense, for it is produced through the

mixture of all existing styles and forms, between narrative, lyric, drama, between prose and

poesy, hovering between these and thereby even breaking the strict older law requiring unity of

linguistic form; the cynic authors went further still along the same path, those who in the greatest

stylistic muddle, in swinging to and fro between prosaic and metric forms arrived even at the

literary image of the “raving Socrates,”8 whom they sought to portray in living color. The

Platonic dialogue was, so to speak, the bark upon which the shipwrecked older poesy and all of

its children were saved: pressed together into a tight space and anxiously subservient to the one

steersman Socrates they forge out [94] into a new world that could never tire of watching the

fantastical images of this procession. Plato has in fact presented all posterity with the model of a

new art form, the model of the novel:9 which can be characterized as an Aesopian fable infinitely

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enhanced, wherein poesy enjoys a rank relative to dialectical philosophy, similar to that which

this same philosophy enjoyed for many centuries relative to theology: namely as an ancilla.10

Plato, under the pressure of the demonic Socrates, forced poesy into this new position.11

Here philosophical thought overgrows the art and compels it to cling tightly to the trunk

of dialectic. The Apollonian tendency has pupated within the logical schematism: indeed we had

perceived something similar in Euripides and additionally a translation of the Dionysian into

naturalistic12 affect.13 Socrates, the dialectical hero of Platonic drama, reminds us of the kindred

nature of the Euripidean hero, who has to defend his actions through argument and counter-

argument and who thereby so often runs the risk of forfeiting our tragic sympathy: for who could

mistake the optimistic element in dialectic, which jubilantly celebrates with every conclusion and

which is only able to breathe in cool lucidity and consciousness: that optimistic element which,

once it had penetrated tragedy, had to gradually overgrow its Dionysian regions and drive them

necessarily to self-annihilation — to the point of its fatal leap into bourgeois theater. Let one

merely call to mind the consequences of the Socratic propositions: “Virtue is knowledge; sin

only arises from ignorance; whoever is virtuous is happy”: in these three basic figures of

optimism lies the death of tragedy. The virtuous hero must thus now be a dialectician, there must

now be a necessary and visible bond between virtue and knowledge, faith and morals,

Aeschylus’s transcendental [95] solution to the problem of justice is now degraded into the

shallow and impudent principle of “poetic justice” with its customary deus ex machina.

How did this new Socratic-optimistic stage world appear now over against the chorus and

generally over against the whole musical-Dionysian subterranean ground of tragedy? As

something accidental, as a reminder of the origin of tragedy that one might well have missed;

even though we have seen that the chorus is only understandable at all as the cause of tragedy

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and of the tragic. Already with Sophocles, that perplexity with regard to the chorus shows itself14

— an important sign, that already with him the Dionysian basis of tragedy is beginning to

crumble. He no longer risked entrusting the chorus with the main share of generating the effect,

but rather reduced its region to such a degree, that it now almost appeared ordered alongside the

spectators, as if it might even be raised up out of the orchestra onto the stage: whereby, of

course, its essence is completely destroyed, even if Aristotle may give his approval to precisely

this view of the chorus. That shifting of the position of the chorus, which Sophocles in any event

recommends through his practice and, according to the tradition, even in writing, is the first step

towards the annihilation of the chorus, the steps of which follow one another with terrible

rapidity in Euripides, Agathon and New Comedy. With the scourge of its syllogisms, optimistic

dialectic drives music out of tragedy: i.e., it destroys the essence of tragedy, which can be

interpreted only as a manifestation and illustration of Dionysian conditions, as the visible

symbolization of music, as the dream world of a Dionysian intoxication.15

If we must then admit an anti-Dionysian tendency already operative before Socrates,

which first achieves an unprecedentedly grand expression with him: we need not then shrink

back before the question, of what such a phenomenon as that of Socrates would indicate: which

indeed, in light [96] of the Platonic dialogues, we are not in a position to conceive of as a merely

corrosive, negative power. And though the most immediate effect of the Socratic drive brought

about the dissolution of Dionysian tragedy, a certain profound life experience of Socrates himself

forces upon us the question, of whether there is then necessarily only an antipodal relationship

between Socratism and art and whether the very birth of an “artistic Socrates” would in itself be

something contradictory.

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 Here and there, namely when confronting art, that despotic logician had the feeling of a

lack, an emptiness, a semi-reproach, a duty perhaps neglected. Often the very same dream

appearance came to him, always saying the same thing, as he explained to his friends while in

jail: “Socrates, make music!”16 Up until his final days, he comforts himself with the notion that

his philosophizing is itself the highest art of the muses, and he could hardly believe that a

divinity would remind him of that “common, popular music.”17 Finally in jail he comes to

understand that, in order to entirely unburden his conscience, he must make even this music for

which he had had little regard. And it is in this mindset that he composes a proem18 to Apollo

and set a few of Aesop’s fables into verse.19 It was something similar to his daemonic warning

voice, that20 urged on him these practices, it was his Apollonian insight, that he like a barbarian

king might have failed to comprehend the noble image of a god and might be at risk of sinning

against the divinity — through his lack of understanding.21 That pronouncement of the Socratic

dream appearance is the single sign of a hesitation concerning the limits of logical nature:

perhaps — he thus must have asked himself — what is not understandable by me is not

immediately something unreasonable? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom, from which the

logician is banned? Perhaps art is even a necessary correlate and supplement to science?22

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 15.

With these last suggestive questions in mind, it must now be stated how the influence of Socrates

has spread itself out over posterity, like a shadow growing ever larger in the setting sun, up to

this very moment, and indeed for the whole of the future, ever again necessitating a regeneration

of art — and indeed of art in the already metaphysical and broadest and deepest of senses —

and, through its own endlessness, guarantees the endlessness of art.

Before this could be recognized, before the innermost dependency of every art upon the

Greeks, the Greeks from Homer to Socrates, had been convincingly demonstrated, we would

have to proceed with these Greeks like the Athenians with Socrates. Almost every era and stage

of cultural development has, with deep disgruntlement at one time or another sought to free itself

from the Greeks,1 because in the face of them everything accomplished by themselves, which

had appeared completely original and rightly and sincerely to be admired, suddenly seemed to

lose its color and life and shriveled up into failed copies, even into caricatures. And thus there

breaks out again, ever anew, the heartfelt wrath against those pretentious little people who had

the audacity to characterize everything non-native for all time as “barbaric”: one asks oneself,

who is this people, who although they exhibit only an ephemeral historical luster, only laughably

narrowly defined institutions, only a dubious competence in morality, and who are distinguished

even by detestable vices, nevertheless lay claim to a dignity and a preeminence among peoples,

befitting a genius among the masses?2 Regrettably, one was not fortunate enough to find the cup

of hemlock, with which such a being could simply be done away with: for all the poison, the

jealously, slander and wrath they engendered is not enough to negate their self-sufficient3

magnificence. And thus one is ashamed and afraid before the Greeks; it may be then that there is

someone who heeds the truth above all else and thus even risks affirming this truth, [98] namely

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that the Greeks have our culture and any other in their hands as charioteers,4 that cart and horse,

however, are almost always of too lowly a stuff and unsuited to the glory of their drivers, who

then taking it as a joke, drive such a team into the abyss: one which they themselves, with the

leap of Achilles,5 spring across.

In order to demonstrate also the dignity of Socrates’ position as charioteer,6 it suffices to

recognize him as a type, a form of existence previously unheard of, the type theoretical human,

and our7 next8 task is to gain insight into the significance and aim of this. The theoretical human

too, like the artist, takes an infinite pleasure in what is present and, like the latter, he is protected

by that pleasure from the practical ethic of pessimism and from its Lynceus-eyes,9 which flash

only in darkness. Specifically, if with every unveiling of the truth the artist with rapt gaze always

remains clinging to what even now, after the unveiling, still remains veil, then the theoretical

human delights in and contents himself with the cast-off veil and his desire’s highest aim is

found in the process of an always successful unveiling carried out by his own strength. There

would be no science, if it were done only for the sake of that one naked goddess10 and nothing

else. For her disciples would then feel like those who sought to dig a hole straight through the

earth: of these anyone can see that, even with tremendous and lifelong effort, one would be able

to dig through only a tiny fraction of that monstrous depth, which would then be covered over

before his very eyes by the work of his successor, such that a third would indeed seem to do well

if he simply chose on his own a new site for his drilling efforts. If11 someone today were to prove

convincingly that the antipodal goal is not to be reached in this direct way, who would still wish

to toil away in the old depths, unless they had become contented in the meantime with finding

noble stones [99] or discovering natural laws. Thus did Lessing, the most honest theoretical

human, dare to confess that for him more lay in the seeking after truth than in truth itself:12

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whereby the fundamental secret of science has been discovered, to the astonishment, indeed, the

ire of the scientifically minded. Now admittedly there stands alongside these individual insights,

as an excess of honesty, if not of overconfidence, a profound delusional notion, which first

entered the world in the person of Socrates, that unshakable faith, that thinking, following the

threads of causality, would reach into the deepest abysses of being, and that thinking would be in

a position not only to know being, but even to correct it. This sublime metaphysical illusion

accompanies science as an instinct and leads it ever again to its limits, where it must transform

itself into art: something13 actually intended, by this very mechanism.

Let us now view Socrates by the torchlight of this thought; he then appears to us as the

first who was prepared not only to live by the hand of this scientific instinct, but — something

far greater — to die by it. And it is for this reason that the image of the dying Socrates serves as

the heraldic shield for anyone who has been relieved of his fear of death through knowledge and

reasons, that shield which hangs over the entry gate of science, reminding each and every one of

the determination to make existence appear intelligible and thereby justified. Toward this end, of

course, when reasons prove insufficient, myth too must be enlisted, something I have even

depicted as a necessary consequence, indeed as the intention, of science.

Whoever once makes clear to himself how after Socrates, that mystagogue of science,

one philosophical school followed the other, like wave upon wave, how the never anticipated

universality of the thirst for knowledge, as a genuine task for every higher capacity, stretched out

to the farthest corners of the civilized world and [100] led science out onto the high seas, after

which it could never again be fully driven off, and how through this universality a common

network of thoughts first stretched across the entire globe, indeed with a view to the lawfulness

of an entire solar system; whoever realizes all this, including the astonishingly high pyramid of

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knowledge of the present, cannot avoid seeing in Socrates the one turning point and vortex of so-

called world history. For if one were even once to imagine the whole incalculable sum of force

that has been expended toward this world tendency, not in the service of knowing, but toward the

practical, i.e., egotistical, goals of individuals and peoples, the instinctive desire to live would

likely be so weakened amidst the general battles of annihilation and the unceasing migration of

peoples that, along with the custom of suicide, the individual would have to sense the last

remnant of a feeling of duty when, like a Fiji Islander, he strangles his own parents as their son

and his friends as their friend.14 A practical pessimism, which could even foster an ethic of mass

murder out of compassion — and this, by the way, is already present everywhere in the world

and was present, wherever art did not appear in some form, such as religion or science, serving

as a remedy and a defense against this pestilential breath.

In view of this practical pessimism, Socrates is the very archetype of the theoretical

optimist, who with the faith in the fathomability of the nature of things just described, attributes

to knowledge and cognition the force of a panacea and conceives error as evil itself. To fathom

those depths and to distinguish true cognition from semblance and error would seem to the

Socratic human to be the most noble, even the only truly human vocation: just as that mechanism

of concepts, judgments and conclusions would be from Socrates on treasured above all other

capacities as the highest pursuit and most wondrous [101] gift of nature. Even the most sublime

of moral acts, the stirrings of sympathy, of sacrifice, of heroism and even that difficult to attain

calm sea of the soul, which the Apollonian Greeks named sophrosynê,15 these were identified by

Socrates and his like-minded followers down to the present as derived from the dialectic of

knowledge and accordingly characterized as teachable. Whoever has himself experienced the

pleasure of a Socratic insight and senses how this, in ever broadening circles, seeks to encompass

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the whole world of appearances, from that point forward he will feel no spur that could more

vehemently drive him to exist than the desire to complete that conquest and weave the net

inescapably tight. To anyone thusly attuned the Platonic Socrates then appears as the teacher of

an entirely new form of “Greek cheerfulness” and blissful existence, which seeks to discharge

itself in actions and this discharge is found mostly in the maieutic16 and pedagogical effects upon

noble youths, with the aim of ultimately producing genius.

But now science, spurred on by its forceful delusion, rushes ineluctably to its limits,

where its optimism, hidden in the essence of logic, founders. The periphery of the circle of

science has infinitely many points and, though it is not yet foreseeable how the circle could ever

be completely measured, a noble and talented human being nevertheless, facing the midpoint of

his existence, inevitably comes upon the boundary points of that periphery and there he stares

into the inilluminable. When he sees here, to his horror, how logic winds around itself at this

boundary and finally bites its own tail — there a new form of knowledge breaks through, tragic

knowledge, which, solely in order to be borne, needs art as protection and remedy.

If we, with eyes strengthened and invigorated by the Greeks, gaze upon the highest

spheres of that world, flowing around us [102], we notice the insatiable greed for optimistic

cognition paradigmatically appearing in Socrates transformed into tragic resignation and the

destitution of art: while nevertheless the very same greed, in its lesser degrees, must express

itself in a manner antagonistic to art and especially inwardly abhor that Dionysian-tragic art, as

this was illustrated for example in the fight against Aeschylean tragedy by Socratism.

Here we now, with feelings stirred, knock upon the gates of the present and the future:

will that “transformation” lead to ever new configurations of genius and specifically to the music

making Socrates?17 Will the net of art spread out over existence, even if in the name of religion

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or science, be woven ever tighter and more finely or is it determined to be torn to shreds in the

restless barbarian drive and vortex that now calls itself “the present”? —18,19 Worried, though not

hopelessly so, we stand to the side for a little while, as contemplatives for whom it is permitted

to bear witness to those monstrous battles and transitions. Alas! It is the magic of these battles

that whoever views them must also join the fray!20

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 16.

[102] With this elaborate historical example we have attempted to make clear, how tragedy

perishes from the disappearance of the spirit of music, just as certainly as it can only be born

from this spirit. To mitigate the strangeness of this claim and to point out the origin of this for

our understanding, we must now set before our free gaze the analogous phenomena of the

present; we must step into the middle of the very struggles that, as I have just stated, are being

waged in the highest spheres of our contemporary world between an insatiable optimistic [103]

knowledge and the tragic need for art. I want to refrain hereby from all the other antagonistic

drives that in every age work against art and especially against tragedy, and that are rampant at

present, confident of victory to such an extent, that of the theatrical arts, e.g., only farce and

ballet are producing sweet-smelling flowers in a rather lush proliferation, though perhaps not for

everyone. I want to speak only of the most illustrious opposition to the tragic worldview and

mean thereby that science which is optimistic in its deepest essence, with its progenitor Socrates

at its head. Those powers should be called out by name immediately, which seem to me to

promise a rebirth of tragedy — and other blessed hopes for the German essence!

Before we rush into the middle of those battles, let us gird ourselves in the armor of the

knowledge we have gained already. Contrary to all those who are so keen in deriving the arts

from one single principle, as the necessary life-source of every work of art, I keep my eyes fixed

upon those two artistic divinities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, and recognize in them the

living and vivid representatives of two art-worlds, which are different in their deepest essence

and in their highest aims. Apollo stands before me, as the transfiguring genius of the principii

individuationis, through whom alone a redemption in appearance is truly to be achieved: while

under the mystical jubilant cry of Dionysus the spell of individuation is shattered and the way is

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laid open to the mother of being, to the innermost core of things. This monstrous opposition,

which gapingly opens between plastic art as Apollonian and music as Dionysian art, has only

become evident to one among the great thinkers, to such an extent that he, even without this

guidance regarding the symbolism of Hellenic divinities, conferred upon music a [104] character

and an origin different from all other arts, because it is not, as those others, a copy of appearance,

but an unmediated copy of the will itself and thus would constitute the metaphysical for

everything physical in the world, the thing-in-itself for every appearance (Schopenhauer, World

as Will and Representation I, p. 310).1 Upon this most important insight for all aesthetics, with

which, taken in a more serious sense, aesthetics first begins, Richard Wagner has placed his

stamp, as confirmation of its eternal truth, when he in his “Beethoven” establishes that music is

to be appraised according to principles completely different from those used for all the plastic

arts and not at all according to the category of beauty:2 even if an errant aesthetic in the hands of

a misdirected and degenerate art may have grown accustomed, by that concept of beauty

prevalent in the world of image-making, to demanding from music an effect similar to that of

works of plastic art, namely the excitation of pleasure in beautiful forms. After this insight into

that monstrous opposition I felt a strong compulsion to draw near to the essence of Greek tragedy

and thereby to the deepest revelation of the Hellenic genius: for just now I believed myself to

have the power of a conjurer, capable of placing before my soul the primordial problem of

tragedy incarnate, beyond the phraseology of our usual aesthetics: whereby I had been granted

such a bewilderingly peculiar glimpse into the Hellenic, that it had to appear to me as though, up

to now, our so proudly posturing classical-Hellenic scholarship has in the main known merely

how to gloat over3 shadow-plays and externalities.4, 5

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 Perhaps we might touch upon that primordial problem with this question: what aesthetic

effect arises, when those intrinsically separate artistic powers of the Apollonian and of the

Dionysian become active side by side? Or succinctly put: how is music related to image and

concept? — Schopenhauer, who Richard Wagner praises on precisely this point for his

unmatched [105] clarity and lucidity of presentation, expresses himself concerning this most

thoroughly in the following passage, which I will reproduce here at its full length (World as Will

and Representation I, p. 3096): “Given all we have said, we can view the appearing world (or

nature) and music as two different expressions of the same thing; this thing itself is thus the only

middle term of their analogy, and it must be cognized before we can have any insight into this

analogy. Seen as the expression of the world, music is therefore a universal language to the

highest degree, indeed it is to the universality of concepts almost what these are to particular

things. But its universality is in no way the empty universality of abstraction; rather, it is of a

different sort altogether, and is united with thorough and clear-cut determinateness. In this

respect it is comparable to numbers and geometric figures, which, as the universal forms of —

and a priori applicable to7 — all possible objects of experience, are not for that matter abstract,

but rather intuitive and thoroughly determinate. All possible endeavors, excitations and

expressions of the will, all processes that take place within human beings and that reason throws

into the broad and negative concept of feeling, can be expressed through the infinitely large

number of possible melodies, but always in the universality of mere form and without matter,

only ever according to the in-itself, not according to appearance, its innermost soul, as it were,

without the body. From this inner relationship of music to the true essence of all things, we can

also explain how it is that if an appropriate piece of music is played with some scene, action,

event, surrounding, it seems to disclose to us its most secret sense, and acts as the clearest and

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most apt commentary on it; moreover, we can also explain that if someone surrenders himself

completely to the impression made by a symphony, it is as if he sees all the possible events of

life and the world passing before him: yet if he pauses and reflects on this, he cannot specify any

point of similarity between the play of notes and the things [106] he has in mind. For music is, as

we have said, different from all other arts in that it is not a copy of appearance, or better, of the

adequate objecthood of the will, but is instead a direct copy of the will itself, and thus presents

what is metaphysical in all that is physical in the world, the thing in itself for all appearance. We

could therefore just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will: this also explains

why music causes every painting, and in fact every scene from real life and the world, suddenly

to emerge in a state of heightened significance; and of course the more so the greater the analogy

there is between the melody and the inner spirit of the given appearance. This is why we can set

a poem to music as a song, or a graphic presentation to music as a pantomime, or the two

together to music as an opera. Such individual images of human life, set to the universal

language of music, are never connected to music or correspond to it with complete necessity;

rather they are to music what an arbitrary example is to a universal concept: they present in the

determinateness of reality what music expresses in the universality of mere form. This is because

melodies are to a certain extent like universal concepts, being abstractions from reality. Reality,

and hence the world of specific things, provides what is intuitive, what is particular and

individual, the specific case both for the universality of concepts as well as for the universality of

melodies, although these two universalities are opposed in a certain respect: concepts contain

simply the very first forms abstracted from intuition, the outer shells that have been stripped off

things, as it were, and are thus wholly authentic abstracta; music on the other hand provides the

innermost kernel, prior to all form — the heart of things. This relationship can be expressed

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extremely well in the language of the Scholastics, where it is said that concepts are the

universalia post rem, while music gives the universalia ante rem, and reality gives universalia in

[107] re.8 — The universal sense of a melody accompanying one literary text could correspond

to the same degree to other, equally arbitrarily selected examples of the universality expressed in

it: this is why the same composition is suitable for many verses, and hence also vaudeville. But

the very possibility of a relationship between a composition and a graphic presentation rests, as

we have said, on the fact that both are expressions of the same inner essence of the world, only

quite different ones. Now when such a relationship is really at hand in a particular case, when the

composer knew how to express the stirrings of the will (which constitutes the kernel of an event)

in the universal language of music, then the melody of the song, the music of the opera is

expressive. But the analogy the composer has discovered between the two must proceed from

direct cognition of the essence of the world, unbeknownst to his reason; it must not be an

imitation mediated through concepts with conscious intentionality: otherwise music would not

express the inner essence, the will itself, but would instead give only an unsatisfactory imitation

of the will’s appearance; this is what happens in all authentically imitative music.”9 —

Therefore, according to Schopenhauer’s doctrine, we understand music as the unmediated

language of the will and we feel our imagination stimulated to give form to the invisible and yet

so vivaciously moved spirit-world that addresses us and to embody this for ourselves in an

analogous example. On the other hand, image and concept, under the influence of a truly

corresponding music arrive at a heightened significance. Dionysian art tends to have a double

effect on Apollonian artistic ability: music excites it to an analogous intuition of Dionysian

universality, whereupon music allows the analogical image to step forth with the utmost

significance. From these facts, intelligible in themselves and admitting of no deeper investigation

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I deduce music’s capacity to give birth to the myth i.e., the most significant example and

precisely the tragic myth: the myth that speaks from Dionysian knowledge in analogies. With the

phenomenon of the lyric poet I have presented how music accordingly struggles within the lyric

poet, [108] to make its essence known in Apollonian images: if we think now, that music in

order to arrive at its greatest height must also seek to come to its highest illustration, then we

must admit it is possible, that it knows how to find the symbolic expression for its own most

authentic Dionysian wisdom; and where else will we have to seek this expression, if not in

tragedy and in general in the concept of the tragic?

From the essence of art, when it is conceived solely according to the categories of

semblance and beauty, tragedy simply cannot be derived in any honest way: it is only from out of

the spirit of music that we understand a joy in the annihilation of the individual. For only through

the specific examples of such an annihilation will the eternal phenomenon of Dionysian music be

made clear to us, which brings to expression the will in its omnipotence, as it were, that stands

behind the principio individuationis, the eternal life beyond every appearance and despite every

annihilation. The metaphysical joy in the tragic is a translation of the instinctive unconscious

Dionysian wisdom into the language of the image: the hero, the highest manifestation of the will,

is negated for our pleasure, because it is indeed only an appearance, and the eternal life of the

will is untouched by its annihilation. “We believe in eternal life,” tragedy shouts; while music is

the unmediated idea of this life. The art of the sculptor has an entirely different goal: here Apollo

overcomes the suffering of the individual through the luminous glorification of the eternity of

appearance, here beauty conquers the suffering inherent to life, in a certain sense pain is falsified

away from the traits of nature. In Dionysian art and in its tragic symbolism this same nature

speaks to us in her true, undisguised voice: “Be as I am! Beneath the incessant exchange of

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appearances the eternally creative primordial mother, eternally pressing toward existence,

eternally relishing this change in appearance!”

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 17.

[109] Dionysian art also wants to convince us of the unending desire for existence: only we

should seek this desire not in appearances, but behind the appearances. Should we recognize how

everything that arises must be prepared for its sorrowful demise, we will be compelled to peer

into the terrors of individual existence — and we should nevertheless not be paralyzed: a

metaphysical solace tears us momentarily out of the turmoil of changing shapes. For a few brief

moments we really are the primordial essence itself and we feel its unrestrained greed and desire

for existence; the struggle, the agony, the annihilation of appearances seems to us now necessary,

given the excess of countless forms of existence, pressing and pushing their way into life, given

the overflowing fertility of the world-will; we will be drilled through by the furious spur of this

agony in the very same moment in which we become one, so to speak, with an immeasurable

primordial desire for existence and in the midst of Dionysian rapture we intimate the

indestructibility and eternity of this desire. In spite of fear and sympathy, we are those

fortunately-alive, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose procreative desire

we are fused.

The story of the emergence of Greek tragedy speaks to us now with lucid certitude, of

how the tragic artwork of the Greeks was born from out of the spirit of music: by way of these

insights we believe we have for the first time done justice to the original and so astonishing

significance of the chorus. We must concede at the same time however, that the previously posed

significance of tragic myth never became clear with conceptual distinctness to the Greek poets,

let alone to the Greek philosophers; to a certain extent their heroes speak more superficially than

they act; myth does not at all find its adequate objectification in the spoken word. The structure

of the scenes and the visible [110] images reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself can

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grasp in words and concepts: the same can also be observed with Shakespeare, whose Hamlet

e.g., in a similar sense speaks more superficially than he acts, so that the earlier mentioned lesson

of Hamlet is to be inferred not from the words, but from the deepened examination and overview

of the whole. As concerns Greek tragedy, which admittedly only comes down to us as a dramatic

text, I have even suggested that the incongruity between myth and word there can easily seduce

us into seeing it as more shallow and insignificant than it is, and accordingly into presuming for

it an even more superficial effect than it must have had according to the testimony of the

ancients: for how easily one forgets that what was not achieved by the poet in words, the

attainment of the highest spiritualization and ideality of the myth, could have1 been achieved by

him at every moment as creative musician! We must admittedly reconstruct for ourselves in an

almost scholarly way the overpowering character of musical effect, in order to receive something

of that incomparable solace which must be proper to true tragedy. But even this musically

overpowering character we would have received as such, only if we were Greeks: whereas in the

entire development of Greek music — over against the infinitely richer music that is known and

familiar to us — we believe we hear only the musical genius’s youthful song, intoned with

modest feelings of strength. The Greeks are, as the Egyptian priests say, the eternal children,2

and even in tragic art they are merely children, who do not know what a sublime toy has arisen

by their hands and — has been destroyed.3

After first attaining a lavish development, that struggling of the spirit of music for an

imagistic and mythical revelation, which intensifies from the beginnings of lyric poetry up to

Attic tragedy, suddenly breaks off and vanishes, as it were, from the face of Hellenic art: while

the [111] Dionysian worldview that was born of this struggle survives in the Mysteries and

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through the most marvelous metamorphoses and degenerations does not cease to attract those of

a more serious nature. What if it never again rises from its mystical depths as art?4

Here we are concerned with the question of whether the power by whose contravening

effect tragedy was broken, has enough strength to hinder an artistic reawakening of tragedy and

of the tragic worldview for all time. If ancient tragedy was derailed by the dialectical drive of

science toward knowledge and optimism, it is to be concluded from this fact that there is an

eternal struggle between the theoretical and the tragic worldview; and only after the spirit of

science is taken to its limit, and its claim to universal validity is annihilated through the

demonstration of those limits, is it permitted to hope for a rebirth of tragedy: for such a cultural

form we would have to employ the symbol of the music-making Socrates, in the sense previously

discussed. By this juxtaposition I understand the spirit of science to be that belief in the

fathomability of nature and in the universal healing power of knowledge, which first saw the

light of day in the person of Socrates.

Whoever recalls the direct consequences of this restlessly forward-pressing spirit of

science will immediately realize how myth was annihilated by it and how with this annihilation

poesy was forced out of its natural ideal soil, and henceforth made homeless. If we have rightly

assigned to music the force by which it could give birth to myth, then we will also have to seek

the spirit of science along that path where it antagonistically confronts this mythopoetic force of

music. This happens in the development of the New Attic Dithyramb,5 the music of which no

longer expressed that inner [112] essence, the will itself, but rather insufficiently reproduced

merely the appearance, in an imitation mediated through concepts: truly musical natures turn

away from such inwardly degenerate music with that same repulsion which they had for the art-

murdering tendency of Socrates. The perspicacious instinct of Aristophanes had certainly seized

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upon something correct, when with the same feeling of hatred he brought together Socrates

himself, the tragedy of Euripides and the music of the New Dithyrambic poets and in all three

phenomena caught scent of the symptoms of a degenerate culture. Through that New Dithyramb,

music is outrageously transformed into an imitative counterfeit of appearance e.g., a battle, a

storm at sea, and is entirely robbed thereby of its mythopoetic force. For if through this it merely

seeks to stimulate our amusement by compelling us to search for external analogies between a

process of life or of nature and certain rhythmic figures and characteristic sounds in music, if our

understanding is supposed to satisfy itself with the recognition of these analogies, then we are

dragged down into a mood in which the reception of the mythical is impossible; for myth wants

to be intuitively received as a singular exemplification of universality and truth peering into the

infinite. Truly Dionysian music confronts us as just such a universal mirror of the world-will:

refracted in this mirror, that intuited event immediately expands for our sensibility into a copy of

an eternal truth. Conversely, any such intuited event immediately casts off its mythical character

in the tone-painting of the New Dithyramb; music has now become the meager copy of

appearance and thereby is infinitely poorer than the appearance itself: by means of such poverty

it drags appearance down for our reception, so that e.g., a battle musically imitated in this way

exhausts itself in the din of marching, signal sounds, etc., [113] and our imagination becomes

captivated precisely by these superficialities. Tone-painting is thus in every respect the opposite

of the mythopoetic force of true music: through it appearance becomes even poorer than it is,

while through Dionysian music the individual appearance is enriched and expanded into6 an

image of the world. It was a powerful victory for the un-Dionysian spirit, when, in the

development of the New Dithyramb, it estranged music from itself and reduced it to a slave of

appearance. Euripides, who in a higher sense must be declared a thoroughly unmusical nature, is

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for precisely this reason a passionate adherent of the New Dithyrambic music and deploys all its

effects and mannerisms with the liberality of a thief.7

From another side we see the force of this un-Dionysian spirit in action, directed against

myth, when we turn our gaze toward the prevalence of character portrayal and psychological

refinements in tragedy from Sophocles onward. The character should no longer be broadened

into an eternal type, but on the contrary, through artificial secondary features and shadings,

through the finest distinctness of all lines, must have such individual effect that the viewer no

longer senses the myth at all, but rather the powerful natural veracity8 and imitative force of the

artist. If here too we become aware of the triumph of appearance over the universal and of the

pleasure taken in the singular anatomical specimen, so to speak, then we are already breathing

the air of a theoretical world, in which scientific understanding is valued more highly than the

artistic mirroring of a global rule. The trend towards characterization advances rapidly: while

Sophocles still portrays whole characters and enlists myth for their refined development,

Euripides already portrays only crude individual character traits, which know to express

themselves in violent passions; in New Attic Comedy [114] there are still only masks with one

expression, reckless old men, outsmarted pimps, cunning slaves in tireless repetition. Now where

has the mythopoetic spirit of music gone? What now still remains of music, it is either

excitational or memorial music, i.e., either a means of stimulation for dulled and depleted nerves

or tone-painting. With the former it scarcely still depends upon the underlying text: indeed with

Euripides it is downright slovenly as when his heroes or choruses first begin to sing; what might

it come to with his impertinent successors?

The new un-Dionysian spirit shows itself most clearly however in the conclusions of the

New Dramas. In Old Tragedy, there was a metaphysical solace that could be sensed at the end,

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without which the pleasure taken in tragedy cannot be explained at all; the conciliatory note from

another world rings out most purely perhaps in the Oedipus at Colonus. Now, as the genius of

music had fled from tragedy, in a strict sense, tragedy is dead: from what then could one now

create that metaphysical solace? An earthly resolution to the tragic dissonance was then sought;

the hero, after having been sufficiently martyred by fate, reaped his well-earned reward in a state

wedding, in divine tributes. The hero had become a gladiator, who, after having been badly

battered and covered in wounds, is eventually granted his freedom. The deus ex machina has

taken the place of metaphysical solace. I will not say, that the tragic worldview was everywhere

and completely destroyed through the surging spirit of the un-Dionysian: we know only, that it

would have to flee from art into the underworld, so to speak, degenerating into a mystery cult.

But into the farthest regions, over the surface of Hellenic life, the devouring breath of that spirit

raged, which9 announced itself in the form of “Greek cheerfulness,” previously discussed as

arising from a feeble unproductive10 desire for existence; [115] this cheerfulness is a counterpart

to the magnificent “naiveté” of the older Greeks, which, according to the given characteristics, is

to be construed as the blossoms of Apollonian culture, growing out of a darkening abyss, as the

victory that the Hellenic will achieved over suffering and the wisdom of suffering through its

mirroring of beauty. The noblest form of that other form of “Greek cheerfulness,” the

Alexandrian, is the cheerfulness of the theoretical human: it exhibits the same characteristic

symptoms that I have just derived from the spirit of the un-Dionysian — that it battles against

Dionysian wisdom and art, that it strives to dissolve myth, that in the place of a metaphysical

solace it posits an earthly concord, indeed a proper deus ex machina, namely a god of the

machine and of the melting pot, i.e., the forces of natural spirits as recognized and applied in the

service of a higher egoism, that it believes in a correction of the world through knowledge, in a

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life led by science and is also actually in a position to entrance the individual human being in the

narrowest circle of completable tasks, within which he can cheerfully say to life: “I want you:

you are worth getting to know.”

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[115] It is an eternal phenomenon: the will in its greed, through an illusion spread out over

things, always finds a means to sustain its creations in life and to compel their survival. This one

is shackled by the Socratic pleasure in knowing and the delusion of thereby being able to heal the

eternal wound of existence, that one is ensnared by the seductively beautiful veil of art fluttering

before his eyes, yet again another one by the metaphysical solace that eternal life flows on

indestructibly beneath the vortex of appearances: to say nothing of the more common and almost

still more forceful illusions, which the will in every moment [116] keeps at the ready. On the

whole, those three stages of illusion are only for more nobly endowed natures, for whom the

burden and difficulty of existence is generally felt with deep displeasure and who deceive

themselves about this displeasure with exquisite stimulants. Everything we call culture consists

of these stimulants: according to the proportion of the mixture we have each time a chiefly

Socratic or artistic or tragic1 culture: or if one will permit a few historical exemplifications:

there is either an Alexandrian or a Hellenic or a Buddhistic2 culture.

Our whole modern world is caught in the net of Alexandrian culture and acknowledges as

ideal the theoretical human, equipped with the greatest cognitive forces, working in the service

of science, whose archetype and progenitor is Socrates. All of our educational means originally

have this ideal in view: any other mode of existence has struggled with effort to raise itself up

alongside this, as a permitted, not an intentional mode of existence. In an almost terrifying sense,

the cultured have long been found here solely in the form of the learned; even our poetic arts

have had to be developed out of learned imitations, and in the main effect of rhyme we still

recognize the emergence of our poetic forms from artificial experiments with non-native,

genuinely learned speech. How unintelligible to a genuine Greek would Faust have to appear,

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that modern cultured human being, intelligible in himself, storming dissatisfied through every

discipline, Faust, devoted to magic and the devil by the drive for knowledge, who we need only

place for comparison beside Socrates in order to recognize that the modern human begins to

suspect the limits of that Socratic desire for knowledge and from out upon the wide deserted sea

of knowledge longs for a shore.3 As Goethe at one time expressed to Eckermann4 in regard to

Napoleon: “Yes, my good man, there is also a productivity of deeds,” thus has he reminded us, in

a gracefully naïve way, [117] that the non-theoretical human is something implausible and

astounding for modern humans, such that it again requires the wisdom of a Goethe in order to

even find so alienating a form of existence conceivable, indeed excusable.

And now one should not conceal from oneself what lies hidden in the womb of this

Socratic5 culture! An unrestricted self-deluding optimism! Now one should not be horrified when

the fruits of this optimism ripen, when society, turned thoroughly sour by a culture of this sort

down to its lowest strata, gradually begins to tremble under rampant surging and desiring, when

faith in the earthly happiness of all, when faith in the possibility of such a universal culture of

knowledge gradually turns into the threatening demand for such an Alexandrian earthly

happiness,6 into the invocation of a Euripidean deus ex machina! One should note this:

Alexandrian culture needs a slave class in order to be able to exist in the long run: but, in its

optimistic view of existence, it denies the necessity of such a class and thus, when the effect of

its beautifully seductive and stirring words about the “dignity of the human” and the “dignity of

labor” has been used up, it moves gradually toward a gruesome annihilation. There is nothing

more frightening than a barbaric slave class, which has learned to regard its existence as an

injustice, and readies itself to take revenge, not merely for itself, but for all generations. Whoever

dares, in the face of such threatening storms, to appeal to a steady courage in our pale and tired7

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religions, which have degenerated even in their foundations into scholarly religions: such that

myth, the necessary presupposition of every religion, is already everywhere paralyzed,8 and even

in this area that optimistic spirit has come to dominance, which we have just characterized as the

annihilating germ of our society.

While the calamity slumbering in the womb of his theoretical culture gradually begins to

worry the modern human [118] and he, disquieted, reaches into the storehouse of his experiences

for a means to repel the danger, without even properly believing in these means; while he

therefore begins to have a presentiment of his own consequences: great, universally gifted,

natures have known how to use, with an unbelievable discretion, the armaments of science itself,

to lay out the limits and the conditions of knowledge in general and thereby decisively to deny

the claim of science to universal validity and universal aims: by such evidence that delusional

notion was first recognized as such, which had presumed, with causality in hand, to be able to

fathom the innermost essence of things. The monstrous bravery and wisdom of Kant and

Schopenhauer has achieved the most difficult victory, the victory over the optimism lying hidden

in the essence of logic, which again is the subterranean ground of our culture. If this endorsed the

knowability and fathomability of all the world’s riddles, supported by the aeternae veritates9 it

found unobjectionable, and had treated space, time and causality as wholly unconditioned laws

of the most universal validity, it was Kant who revealed how these actually only served to raise

mere appearance, the work of Maya, to the single and highest reality10 and to place this at the site

of the innermost and true essence of things and to make the actual knowledge of the latter

thereby impossible, i.e., according to a Schopenhauerian saying, to put the dreamer even more

soundly to sleep (W.a.W.a.R. I, p. 498).11 With this knowledge, a culture is introduced, which I

would hazard to designate a tragic12 one: whose most important characteristic is that a wisdom

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takes the place of science as the highest goal, one which, undeceived by the seductive diversions

of the sciences, turns itself with unmoved gaze toward the composite image of the world and in

this seeks with sympathetic feelings of love to grasp eternal suffering as its own suffering. Let us

consider a generation growing up with this [119] dauntlessness of gaze, heroically pulled into the

monstrous, let us think of the bold step of these dragon slayers, the proud audacity with which

they turn their back on all the doctrinal delicacies in that optimism, so as “to live resolutely” in

whole and in full:13 should it not be necessary that, with his self-education in seriousness and in

terror, the tragic human of this culture desire a new art as the Helen who belongs to him, the art

of metaphysical solace, tragedy and must call out with Faust:

And shall I not, with a most yearning vehemence,

bring to life this most singular figure?14

After Socratic15 culture is shaken from two sides, however, and the scepter of its

infallibility can only yet be held with trembling hands, first from fear of its own consequences,

which it immediately thereafter begins to suspect, next because it itself is no longer convinced,

with its previous naïve confidence, of the eternal validity of its foundations: thus is it a sad play,

as the dance of its thinking hurls itself longingly after ever new figures, in order to embrace

them, and then suddenly again lets them go with a shudder, like Mephistopheles does the

seductive Lamiae.16 This is indeed the characteristic of that “break,” which everyone tends to

speak of as the primordial affliction of modern culture, according to which the theoretical human

is terrified before his own consequences and, dissatisfied, no longer risks entrusting himself to

the frightening ice flow of existence: he anxiously runs up and down the shore. He no longer

wants to have anything entirely, in its entirety even with all the natural gruesomeness of things.

To such an extent had the optimistic view pampered him. Moreover, he senses how a culture that

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is built upon the principle of science must perish when it begins to become illogical i.e., to

retreat from its consequences. Our art reveals this universal need: that one in vain imitatively

relies upon all great productive periods and [120] natures, that one in vain gathers the whole of

“world literature” about oneself for the solace of the modern human and places oneself centrally

among the artistic styles and artists of every age, so that, like Adam with the animals, he would

give each a name:17 he remains indeed the eternally hungering one, the “critic” without pleasure

or strength, the Alexandrian human, who is at base a librarian and a corrector and one miserably

blinded by book dust and typographic errors.

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 19.1

[120] One cannot characterize2 the innermost content of this Socratic culture more keenly than

by calling it the culture of opera: for if we hold together the genesis of opera and the facts of

opera’s development with the eternal truths of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the culture

expresses itself in this area, to our amazement, with genuine naivete about its willing and

knowing. I recall first the emergence of the stilo rappresentativo3 and of the recitative.4 Is it

credible that this entirely superficial operatic music, unfit for devotion, could be welcomed and

fostered with rapturous favor as the rebirth of all true music, so to speak, by an age in which the

inexpressibly sublime and holy music of Palestrina5 had just arisen? And who on the other hand

would like to find the diversion-addicted opulence of that Florentine circle6 and the vanity of

their dramatic singers solely responsible for the quite impetuously spreading delight in opera?

That alongside the vaulted construction of Palestrinian harmony, toward which the entire

Christian middle ages had been building, there awakened at the same time, indeed in the same

people, that passion for a half-musical way of speaking, I can only explain for myself by way of

a contributing extra-artistic tendency in the essence of the recitative.

[121] To the listener, who wants to hear the words of the singing clearly, there

corresponds the singer, insofar as he speaks more than sings and in this half-singing he

intensifies his pathetic enunciation: through this intensification of pathos he makes the

understanding of the words easier and overcomes that remaining half of the music. The actual

danger, which now threatens him, is that, at some point he inopportunely confers greater weight

to the music, whereby the pathos of the speech and clarity of the words would have to perish

immediately: while on the other hand he always feels the drive for a musical discharge and a

virtuoso presentation of his voice. Here the “poet” comes to his aid, who knows to offer him

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sufficient opportunities for lyrical interjections, word and sentence repetitions etc.: in which

places the singer now, without regard for the words, can luxuriate in the purely musical elements.

This change from a more affectively insistent though only half-sung speech to an entirely sung

interjection, which lies in the essence of the stilo rappresentativo, this swiftly shifting effort to

act now upon the concept and the representation, now upon the musical ground of the listener, is

something so entirely unnatural and in a similar way so internally contradictory to the artistic

drives of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, one has to conclude that the origin of the recitative

lies outside all artistic instincts. According to this sketch, the recitative is to be defined as the

jumble of epic and lyric recitation and in no case an internally constant mixture, which could not

be achieved with such entirely disparate things, but rather the most extreme mosaic-like

conglutination7 of a sort that is entirely without precedent in the realm of nature and experience.

But this was not the intention of those inventors of the recitative: much more they themselves

believe, and with them their era, that the mystery of ancient music would be solved through that

stilo rappresentativo, from which the monstrous effect of an [122] Orpheus, Amphion,8 indeed

even of Greek tragedy can be explained. The new style counted as the reawakening of the most

effective music, that of the ancient Greeks: indeed, with the universal and entirely popular

conception of the Homeric world as the primordial world, one allowed oneself to surrender to

the dream of having once again descended into the paradisiacal beginnings of humanity, in

which even the music must necessarily have had that unsurpassed purity, power and innocence

which the poets knew how to convey so touchingly in their pastorals.9 Here we see into the

innermost development of this truly authentic modern genre of art, the opera: a mighty need

compels an art here, but a need of a non-aesthetic kind: the longing for the idyllic, the belief in

the primordial prehistoric existence of artistic and good human beings. The recitative counted as

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the rediscovered language of that primordial humanity; the opera as the regained country of that

idyllic or heroically good being, who at the same time follows a natural artistic drive in all of his

dealings, who with everything he has to say sings at least something, such that at the slightest

excitation of feeling he immediately sings in full voice.10 For us it makes no difference that with

these newly produced images of the paradisiacal artist the humanists of that time battled against

the old church representation of the corrupted and lost human: such that opera is to be

understood as the opposed dogma of the good human, but by this a means of solace was likewise

found against that pessimism which, due to the horrible uncertainty in every circumstance, had

most strongly enticed the seriously minded of the age. It is enough, if we have recognized how

the authentic magic and thereby the genesis of this new art form lies in the satisfaction of an

entirely non-aesthetic need, in the optimistic glorification of the human in itself, in the

conception of the primordial human as the naturally good and artistic human: which11 the

principle of opera gradually transformed into a threatening and dreadful [123] demand, one that

we, in view of the socialist movement of the present, are no longer able to ignore. The “good

primordial human” wants his rights: what paradisiacal prospects!

I would set alongside this yet another equally clear confirmation of my position that the

opera is constructed upon the very same principles as our Alexandrian culture.12 The opera is the

birth of the theoretical human, of the critical laity, not of the artist: one of the most alienating

facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of a quite authentically unmusical audience,

that above all one must understand the words: such that a rebirth of the tonal art would have to

be expected, if one were to discover some way of singing, by which the words of the text would

reign over the counterpoint like a lord over a servant. For the words would be just as much

nobler than the accompanying harmonic system, as the soul is nobler than the body.13 In the

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beginnings of opera, the connection between music, image and word was handled with the

unmusical lay coarseness of this viewpoint; it was also in keeping with this aesthetic that the first

experiments arose in the genteel lay circles of Florence, by the poets and singers patronized

there. The14 artistically impotent human generates a kind of art, precisely because he is the non-

artistic human as such. Because he has no inkling of the Dionysian depths of music, he

transforms musical enjoyment through the stilo rappresentativo into an intellectualized word-

and tone-rhetoric of passion and into the voluptuousness of the arts of singing; because he is

incapable of having a vision, he forces machinists and decorative artists into his service; because

he does not know how to conceive the true essence of the artist, he conjures up before himself

the “artistic primordial human” according to his taste i.e., the human who in the throes of passion

sings and speaks in verse. He dreams himself into a time in which passion sufficed to generate

songs and poems: as if each time [124] the affect would have been in a position to produce

something artistic. The presupposition of opera is a false belief about the artistic process and

indeed that idyllic belief, that actually every sensitive human being is an artist. In keeping with

this belief, opera is the expression of the laiety in art, which dictates its laws with the cheery

optimism of the theoretical human.15

Should we wish to unite under one concept the two representations just depicted as active

in the emergence of opera, it would only remain for us to speak of an idyllic tendency in opera:

whereby we need only make use of Schiller’s mode of expression and explanation.16 Either, he

says, nature and the ideal are objects of sadness, the former presented as lost, the latter as

unattained. Or both are objects of joy, in that they are presented as actual. The first yields elegy,

in a narrower sense, the other the idyll in a wider sense. Here then we must immediately point to

the common characteristic of those two representations in the genesis of opera, namely that in

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them the ideal is not felt as unattained, nature not as lost. According to this feeling, there was a

primeval time of humans, in which they lay at the heart of nature and with this naturalness they

had at the same time attained the very ideal of humanity, in paradisiacal goodness and artistry:

from17 these perfect primordial humans we all are supposed to have descended, indeed whose

faithful image we would still be: only we must cast off a few things from ourselves, in order to

recognize in ourselves once again these primordial humans through a voluntary renunciation of

superfluous learnedness, of an overabundant culture. The cultured person of the Renaissance,

through his operatic imitation of Greek tragedy, let himself be led back to just such a harmony of

nature and ideal, to an idyllic actuality,18 he used this tragedy like Dante used Virgil so as to be

led up to the gates of paradise: [125] while from here he proceeds still further independently and

transitions from an imitation of the highest Greek art form to a “restoration of all things,” to an

imitation of the original art world of the human. What a confident good-heartedness in these

reckless endeavors, there in the very womb of theoretical culture! — solely to be explained in

terms of the consoling faith that “the human in itself” is the eternally virtuous opera hero, the

eternally flute-playing or singing shepherd, who must ultimately always rediscover himself as

such, were he at some point actually to have lost himself for a time, the fruit solely of that

optimism which rises up like a sweetly seductive column of smoke from the depths of the

Socratic worldview.

In no case do the features of opera exhibit that elegiac pain of an eternal loss, but much

more the cheerfulness of an eternal recovery, the comfortable pleasure in an idyllic actuality,

which one can at least represent to oneself as actual at any moment: whereby perhaps someday

one suspects that this supposed actuality is nothing more than a fantastically silly trifle, about

which anyone capable of measuring it against the frightful seriousness of true nature and of

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comparing it with the authentic primordial scenes of the beginnings of humanity would have to

cry out in disgust: Away with the phantom! Nevertheless one would be wrong to believe that

such a trifling being as opera could be dispelled, like a specter, merely with a forceful shout.

Whoever wants to annihilate opera must take up the fight against that Alexandrian cheerfulness,

which expresses itself so naively regarding its favorite idea in opera, its authentic art form. But

for art itself what is to be expected from the working of an art form, the origins of which lie not

at all in the aesthetic realm, indeed which has stolen over into the artistic domain from out of a

half moral sphere and which has only been able to deceive us occasionally about this hybrid

emergence? [126] On what juices did this parasitic operatic being nourish itself, if not on those

of true art? Is it not to be surmised that, among its idyllic temptations, among its Alexandrian arts

of flattery, the task of art deemed highest and truly serious — redeeming the eye from gazing

into the gruesomeness of the night and saving the subject from the convulsions19 of the stirrings

of the will through the healing balm of semblance20 — degenerates into an empty and dissipated

tendency toward delectation? What becomes of the eternal truths of the Dionysian and the

Apollonian, in that mixing of styles which I have shown to be the essence of the stilo

rappresentativo? where music is regarded as servant, words as master, music compared to the

body, words to the soul? where the highest goal will be at best focused upon a periphrastic tone

painting, similar to what was done previously in New Attic dithyrambs? where the music is fully

estranged from its true dignity, that of being a Dionysian mirror of the world, such that what is

left for it, as the slave of appearance, is to imitate the formal essence of the appearance and

excite a superficial delight in the play of lines and proportions. Under rigorous scrutiny, opera’s

disastrous influence upon music coincides exactly with the whole development of modern music;

for the optimism lurking in the genesis of opera and in the essence of the culture represented by

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it succeeded with an alarming rapidity in stripping music of its Dionysian world destiny and

stamping upon it a formally playful, pleasing character: only the metamorphosis of the

Aeschylean human into the Alexandrian human of cheerfulness may be compared to a certain

extent with this alteration.

But if in the exemplification suggested here we have justifiably connected the

disappearance of the Dionysian spirit with a highly conspicuous, though hitherto unexplained

transformation and degeneration of the Greek human being — [127] what hopes must be revived

in us, if the most certain of all auspices were to guarantee for us the reverse process, the gradual

awakening of the Dionysian spirit in our present-day world! It is not possible that the divine

force of Heracles goes slack, forever in salacious service to Omphale.21 From the Dionysian

ground of the German spirit a power has arisen, which has nothing in common with the

primordial conditions of Socratic culture and in terms of which it is neither to be explained nor

excused, but will be experienced by this culture much more as something terribly-inexplicable,

as overpoweringly-hostile, German music, which we are to understand chiefly through the

powerful path of this sun from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner. In the best of

cases, how could the Socratics of our day, lusting after knowledge, even get started with this

daemon rising up from the inexhaustible depths? Neither from the zigzags and arabesques of

operatic melody, nor by aid of the arithmetical abacus of the fugue and of the contrapuntal

dialectic is the formula to be found, in whose triply potent light one could make that daemon

subservient and compel it to speak. What a farce, if now our aestheticians strike and, with their

own proper “beauty” as snare, trap the musical genius before them scurrying about with

inconceivable life, with movements that can be judged by eternal beauty just as little as by the

sublime. One need only observe these music patrons once, in the flesh and up close, as they so

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untiringly shout beauty! beauty!, as to whether they resemble the favored children of nature

educated and spoiled in the lap of the beautiful or whether they are not far rather seeking a

duplicitous veiling form for their own roughness, an aesthetic pretext for the impoverished

sensitivity of their sobriety: I am thinking here of e.g., Otto Jahn.22 But may the liar and the

hypocrite beware of German music: [128] for it is precisely, in the midst of all our culture, the

only pure, clear and purifying fire spirit, from out of which and into which, as in the teaching of

the great Heraclitus of Ephesus, all things move in a double circulation:23 everything we now call

culture, education, civilization, will one day have to appear before the infallible judge

Dionysus.24

Let us remember how, flowing from those same springs, it was then possible for the spirit

of German philosophy, through Kant and Schopenhauer, to annihilate scientific Socratism’s

contented pleasure in existence, with a proof of its limits, how through this proof there was

introduced an infinitely deeper and more serious consideration of ethical questions and of art,

which we can directly characterize as Dionysian wisdom grasped in concepts: where does the

mystery of this unity between German music and German philosophy point us, if not toward a

new form of existence, the contents of which we can only learn by conjecturing from Hellenic

analogies? For the Hellenic model retains an immeasurable value for those of us who stand at the

boundary of two distinct forms of existence, for in it even all those transitions and battles are

stamped into a classically-instructive form: if only we live by analogy through the great main

epochs of the Hellenic essence, as it were, in reverse order and, for example, now seem to be

stepping backwards from the Alexandrian age to the period of tragedy. Thus we live feeling as if

the birth of a tragic age for the German spirit would have to mean merely a return to itself, a

blessed rediscovery of itself, after monstrous powers long pressing in from the outside, as it

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persisted in a helpless barbarity of form, had compelled it into a servitude under their forms.

Now finally it may be permitted, after its return to the primordial spring of its essence, loosed

from the leading strings25 of a Romance civilization,26 to risk stepping forward bold and free

before all peoples [129]: if only it understood how to learn without diversion from just one

people, from whom to be able to learn at all is already something of high renown and an

exceptional rarity, from the Greeks. And when have we needed this highest of all teachers more

than now, as we experience the rebirth of tragedy and are in danger of neither knowing whence it

comes, nor being able to interpret where it wants to go?

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 20.

[129] Someday, under the eye of an impartial judge, it may be ascertained in what age and in

which men the German spirit has to this point most vigorously struggled to learn from the

Greeks; and if we accept with confidence, that this singular honor must be accorded to the most

noble cultural battle waged by Goethe, Schiller and Winckelmann, it would in any case have to

be added, that since that age and the most immediate aftermath of their struggle, the striving to

proceed along a similar path toward education and the Greeks has in an incomprehensible way

become weaker and weaker. Should we not be permitted to conclude from this, so as to avoid

complete despair concerning the German spirit, that in some main points even those combatants

in the struggle may not have been successful in penetrating to the core of the Hellenic essence

and in producing an abiding bond of love between the German and Greek cultures? So that

perhaps an unconscious recognition of this lack may have aroused despondent misgivings even

in more serious natures, as to whether, following such predecessors, one could proceed any

further than1 they had along this cultural path and ever reach the goal. On account of this, we see

since then a most worrying degeneration in the judgement as to the worth of the Greeks for

culture;2 the expression of a sympathetic superiority can be heard in the most various [130]

outposts of the spirit and lack of spirit; elsewhere an entirely inconsequential sweet talk trifles

with “Greek harmony,” “Greek beauty,” “Greek cheerfulness.” And in precisely those circles

whose value could lie in a tireless creating, from out of the alluvial Greek soil,3 for the health of

German culture, namely in the circles of teachers at our institutions of higher education, one has

learned best how to come to terms with the Greeks quickly and in a comfortable way, not

infrequently to the point of a skeptical abandonment of Hellenic ideals and a complete reversal

of the true intention4 of all studies of antiquity. Whoever in these circles has not fully exhausted

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himself in the effort of being a reliable corrector of ancient texts or a linguistic microscopist of

natural history, he perhaps even seeks to appropriate Greek antiquity, alongside other antiquities,

“historically,” but in any case according to the method and with the superior attitude5 of today’s

learned historiography. If accordingly the authentic cultural vigor of our higher educational

institutions has indeed never been more impoverished and weak than at present, if the

“journalist,” the paper slave of the day, has secured the victory in everything concerning culture6

over the more elevated teacher, and to the latter, now even speaking in the manner of a journalist,

with the “easy elegance” of that sphere, there remains only the metamorphosis, often already

undergone, of fluttering about as a cheerful learned butterfly — with what embarrassing

confusion today must the learned individuals of this sort gaze upon that phenomenon, which

perhaps could only be grasped analogously from the deepest ground of the hitherto

uncomprehended Hellenic genius,7 the reawakening of the Dionysian spirit and the rebirth of

tragedy? There is no other artistic period, in which so-called culture and authentic art are so

estranged and so aversely opposed to one another, as what we see with our own eyes at present.

We understand why such a feeble culture hates true art; because [131] it fears its own downfall

by way of it. But should not an entire form of culture,8 namely that of the Socratic-Alexandrian,

have outlived itself, once it could develop into such a dainty-frail pinnacle, as is our

contemporary culture!9 If such heroes, like Schiller and Goethe, have not been successful in

breaking down that enchanted portal which leads to the Hellenic magic mountain, if in their most

courageous struggles they came no further than that longing gaze10 which Goethe’s Iphigenia

sends back from barbarian Tauris toward her homeland across the sea, then what would remain

for the epigones of such heroes to hope for, if not that suddenly, completely from the other side,

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untouched by all the efforts of previous culture, the portal should open to them of its own accord

— under the mystical strains of a reawakened music of tragedy.

Let no one seek to wither away our belief in a still impending rebirth of Hellenic

antiquity; for in it alone do we find our hope for a renewal and a purification of the German spirit

through the magic-fire11 of music. What else could we name that might awaken any such

consoling expectations concerning the future amidst the desolation and weariness of today’s

culture? In vain we peer about looking for a single vigorously branched root, for even a patch of

fertile and healthy soil: everywhere dust, sand, rigidity, famine. Here a disconsolate loner could

select no better symbol for himself than the Knight, Death and the Devil, as Dürer12 has etched it

for us, the armored knight with the iron hard gaze, who knows only to pursue his terrible path

undeterred by his horrible companions, and yet hopeless, alone with steed and hound. Just such a

Düreresque knight was our Schopenhauer: he lacked every hope, but he wanted the truth. There

is no one like him. —

But how even that gloomily portrayed wilderness of our tired culture is suddenly

transformed, when [132] touched by Dionysian magic! A windstorm seizes upon all that is

decrepit, rotten, broken, withered, wraps it up whirlingly in a red cloud of dust and carries it into

the air like a vulture. Confused, our eyes search for what has disappeared: for what they see is

like something submerged rising into the golden light, so full and green, so lusciously alive, so

yearningly immeasurable. Tragedy sits in the middle of this excess of life, pain and pleasure, in

sublime rapture, hearkening to a distant melancholy song — it tells13 of the mother of being,

whose name is: delusion, will, woe. — Yes, my friends, believe with me in Dionysian life and in

the rebirth of tragedy. The time of the Socratic human being is over: crown yourselves in ivy,

take the thyrsus staff in hand and be not surprised, when tigers and panthers lay themselves

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affectionately at your feet. Now just dare to be tragic human beings: for you shall be redeemed.

You shall accompany the Dionysian pageant from India to Greece! Gird yourselves for a hard

fight, but believe in the miracle of your god!

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[132] Gliding back from these exhortative2 tones into the mood befitting contemplation, I repeat

that only from the Greeks can it be learned what significance such a miraculous sudden

awakening of tragedy has for a people’s innermost ground of life. They are the people of the

tragic mysteries, who fought the battles against the Persians: and in turn the people who waged

those wars required tragedy as a necessary restorative potion. After they were for multiple

generations agitated to their core by the strongest spasms of the Dionysian daemon, who would3

suspect4 precisely with these people still such a steady forceful effusion of the most simple

political feeling, of the most natural instinct of the homeland, of the [133] original manly lust for

war? Is it not always detectible with every significant spreading of Dionysian agitation, how the

Dionysian dissolution of the shackles of individuation makes itself felt first of all in a derogation

of the political instincts that intensifies into indifference, yes even into animosity, just as

certainly on the other hand is state-crafting Apollo likewise the genius of the principii

individuationis, for the state and a sense of homeland cannot live without the affirmation of the

individual personality. Only one path leads out of the orgiastic for a people, the path to Indian

Buddhism, which, in order to be endured at all with its yearning for nothingness, requires those

rare ecstatic states with their elevation above space, time and the individual: as these in turn

require a philosophy that teaches the overcoming of the indescribable displeasure of intermediate

states by means of an idea.5 Precisely thus does a people, starting from the unconditional validity

of political drives, fall necessarily into a path of the most extreme secularization,6 whose

greatest, but also most terrible expression is the Roman imperium.7

Situated between India and Rome and pressed toward the more seductive choice, the

Greeks succeeded in inventing an additional third form of classical purity, one admittedly not

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used by them for long, but for that very reason immortal. For while it holds for all things that the

favorites of the gods die young, it is just as certain that they then live eternally with the gods.

One may not demand that the most noble of all have the durable toughness of leather; the rough

persistence that was proper to, e.g., the Roman national drives, probably does not belong among

the necessary predicates of perfection. If we ask, however, what remedy was it that enabled the

Greeks, in their greatest age, with the extraordinary strength of their Dionysian and political

drives to exhaust themselves neither in an ecstatic brooding nor in a consuming chase after

worldly power and worldly honor, [134] but rather to arrive instead at that splendid mixture, like

a noble wine that simultaneously inspires and makes contemplative, then we must be mindful of

the monstrous might of tragedy, exciting, purifying and discharging the entire lifeforce of the

people; the highest value of which we would first intimate, when it confronts us, as with the

Greeks, as the epitome of all prophylactic healing powers, as the reigning mediator between the

strongest and the most fateful intrinsic characteristics of the people.

Tragedy absorbs the highest orgiastic music into itself, such that, for the Greeks as for us,

it brings music directly to its completion, but then it places alongside it tragic myth and the tragic

hero, who then, like a powerful Titan,8 takes the entire Dionysian world on his back and

unburdens us of it: while on the other hand through the same tragic myth, in the person of the

tragic hero, it knows how to release one from the greedy urge to exist, and with an admonishing

hand recalls us to another being and a higher pleasure, for which the battling hero ominously

prepares himself not through his victory, but through his downfall. Between the universal

validity of its music and the audience member receptive to the Dionysian, tragedy inserts a

sublime likeness, the myth, and awakens with this the semblance that music would be merely

one of the highest means of presentation for bringing the plastic world of myth to life. Trusting

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in this noble deception, it can now move its limbs to the dithyrambic dance and surrender itself

unhesitatingly to an orgiastic feeling of freedom,9 in which, as music itself, it dare not indulge

without that deception. Myth protects us from music, even as on the other hand it first provides

this with its highest freedom. Thus, in reciprocation, music lends tragic myth a quite urgent and

convincing metaphysical significance, such as word and image are never capable of attaining

without that singular aid; and [135] through this in particular the tragic spectator is overcome by

that certain presentiment of a highest pleasure, the path to which leads through downfall and

negation, so that he thinks he hears the innermost abyss of things speaking audibly to him.

If with the last sentences I have been able to give this difficult representation perhaps

merely a preliminary expression, immediately intelligible to few, then on precisely this point I

may not relent from inciting my friends to a renewed attempt and from asking them to prepare

themselves for the recognition of a universal principle through a single example from our shared

experience. With this example, I will not even mention those who use images of scenic events,

the words and affects of acting people, to draw closer to musical feeling with their help; for none

of them speak music as their mother tongue and, despite that help, come no further than the

vestibules of musical perception, without ever being allowed to touch its innermost sanctuary;

many of these, like Gervinus, who take this path do not even arrive at the vestibule. Rather, I

shall turn only to those who are immediately related to music, have in it their maternal womb, so

to speak, and who connect to things almost exclusively through an unconscious musical

relationship. To these genuine musicians I direct the question, whether they are able to think of a

human being who is in a position to perceive the third act of Tristan and Isolde, without the

assistance of word and image, purely as a tremendous symphonic movement, without expiring

amid the convulsive unfurling of all the wings of the soul?10 A human being who has, as here,

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laid his ear, so to speak, upon the heart chamber of the world-will, who feels the racing desire for

existence flow out from here into all the veins of the world, whether as thundering river or as the

most delicate evaporating brook, should he not of a sudden crumble? In the wretched glass shell

of the human individuum, he is to withstand perceiving the echo of innumerable cries of pleasure

and pain from the “wide [136] space11 of the world night,”12 without in this shepherds’ dance of

metaphysics incessantly taking refuge in his primordial homeland? If, however, such a work can

be perceived as a whole, without the negation of the individual existence, if such a creation could

be brought about, without shattering its creator — where would we find the solution to such a13

contradiction?14

Here there is inserted between that music and our highest musical excitation tragic myth

and the tragic hero, at base only a likeness of the omni-universal facts, of which music alone can

speak in a direct way. But as a likeness, were we to feel as purely Dionysian beings do, myth

would remain standing alongside us wholly ineffectual and unheeded, and at no moment would it

dissuade us from lending our ear to the echo of the universalia ante rem. Here, however, the

Apollonian force breaks forth with the healing balm of a blissful deceit, aimed at a restoration of

the nearly exploded individuum: suddenly we believe we see merely Tristan, as he asks himself

unmoving and dull: “the old melody; why does it wake me?”15 And what earlier had struck us as

a cavernous sighing from the center of being, that now merely says to us, how “desolate and

empty the sea.”16 And where we believed we might breathlessly expire from the convulsive

reaching out of all feelings, and only something meager still tied us to this existence, we hear and

see now merely the hero, mortally wounded and yet not dying, with his despairing cry:17

“Yearning! Yearning! In dying to yearn, not dying from yearning!”18 And if previously, after

such an excess and such an overabundance of consuming agonies, the jubilation of the horn19 cut

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through our heart like the greatest of those agonies, there now stands between us and this

“jubilation as such,” the rejoicing Kurwenal, turning toward the ship that carries Isolde. As

violently as even pity [137] reaches into us, in a certain sense pity saves us from the primordial

suffering of the world, like the allegorical image of the myth saves us from an immediate

intuition of the highest idea of the world, like thought and word save us from the unchecked

outpouring of unconscious will. Through this magnificent Apollonian deception, it seems to us

as though even the realm of sound would confront us as a plastic world, as though therein even

the fate of Tristan and Isolde would be formed and sculpturally shaped from the finest and most

expressive material.

Thus does the Apollonian tear us away from Dionysian universality and fascinate us with

individuals; to them it binds our aroused pity, through them it satisfies our sense of beauty,

thirsting for great and sublime forms; it parades before us images of life and excites us to a

thoughtful comprehension of the kernel of life contained in them. With the tremendous impact of

the image, of the concept, of the ethical doctrine, of sympathetic excitement, the Apollonian

snatches the human being up out of his orgiastic self-annihilation and blinds him to the

universality of the Dionysian process, for the sake of the delusion that he see only a single world

image, e.g., Tristan and Isolde, and this, through the music, he is to see better and more inwardly

still.20 What can the healing magic of Apollo not do, if it itself can arouse in us the illusion that

the Dionysian would really be able to intensify its effects in the service of the Apollonian, indeed

as if even music would be essentially an art for the presentation of an Apollonian content?

With that preestablished harmony reigning between the completed drama and its music,

the drama reaches the highest degree of visibility, one otherwise unattainable for verbal drama.

In the independently moving lines of the melody, every living figure in the scene simplifies itself

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before us into the distinctness of an undulating line, the concurrence of these lines resounds for

us in the harmonic shifts, which sympathize in the most delicate way with the changing action:

through21 which [138] the relations between things become immediately audible for us in a

sensibly discernable manner, in no way abstract, just as we likewise recognize through it, that

only in these relations would the essence of a character and of a melodic line purely reveal

themselves. And while music compels us to see so much more and more inwardly than usual and

compels the action22 of the scene to spread out before us like a delicately spun web, the world of

the stage is just as infinitely expanded as it is illuminated from within for our animated eye,

gazing into the interior. What analogue could the poet of words offer, laboring away to arrive at

that inward expansion of the visible stage-world and its inner illumination by means of a much

more imperfect mechanism, by an indirect path, proceeding from word and concept? Indeed if

musical tragedy now adds the word as well, it can at the same time place alongside it the

subtending ground and the birthplace of the word and make clear for us the becoming of the

word, outwardly from within.

About the process just sketched, however, it could just as definitely be said that it would

only be a magnificent semblance, namely that previously mentioned Apollonian deception,

through whose effect we are to be relieved of the Dionysian rush and excess. Indeed, at base the

relationship of music to drama is precisely the reverse: music is the authentic idea of the world,

drama only a refraction of this idea, an individuated silhouette thereof. When viewing musical

tragedy, that there is an identity between the melodic line and the living figure, between the

harmony and that figure’s relations to other characters is true, but in a sense opposed to what we

might think. However we might move, animate or illuminate from within the figure, for the sake

of greater visibility, it remains only ever an appearance, from which there is no bridge leading to

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the true reality, to the heart of the world. But music speaks from out of this heart; and should

innumerable appearances of that kind be draped over the same music, [139] they would never

exhaust the essence of it, but rather only ever be its superficial copies. Obviously with the

popular and wholly false opposition of soul to body, nothing about the difficult relation between

music and drama is clarified and everything is confused; but the unphilosophical coarseness of

that opposition appears to have become a well-known article of faith precisely among our

aestheticians, who knows for what reasons, while they have learned nothing about the opposition

between appearance and thing-in-itself or, for similarly unknown reasons, do not want to learn.

If it has resulted from our analysis, that the Apollonian in tragedy has through its

deception won a total victory over the primordial Dionysian element of music and that it has put

music in the service of its own aims, namely that of bringing drama to its utmost distinctness, a

very important qualification is to be added: at the most essential point of all that Apollonian

deception is broken through and annihilated. The drama, which, with the help of music, spreads

out before us with such internally illuminated distinctness of all movements and figures, as

though we were watching a textile emerge from the up and down twitching of the loom —

achieves as a whole an effect that lies beyond any Apollonian artistic effect. In the collective

effect of tragedy, the Dionysian attains precedence once again; it closes with a sound, that could

never ring forth from the realm of Apollonian art. And thereby the Apollonian deception shows

itself as what it is, the sustained veiling of the Dionysian effect over the duration of the tragedy:

which nevertheless is powerful enough to compel in the end even the Apollonian drama into a

sphere, where it begins to speak with Dionysian wisdom and where it renounces itself and its

Apollonian visibility. Thus the difficult relationship between the Apollonian and the Dionysian

[140] in tragedy would really be symbolized by a fraternal bond of the two divinities: Dionysus

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speaks the language of Apollo, but Apollo ultimately the language of Dionysus: whereby the

highest aim of tragedy and of art in general is attained.

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[140] Let the attentive friend imagine for himself according to his experiences the effect of a true

musical tragedy pure and unmixed. I believe I have described the phenomenon of this effect so

much from both sides, that he will now know how to interpret his own experiences. He will

specifically recall how, in view of the myth playing out before him, he felt himself elevated to a

kind of omniscience, as if his eyes’ ability to see was not merely a faculty for surfaces, but rather

was capable of penetrating into the interior, and as if he now saw before him, with the help of

music, sensually visible, as it were, the surging of the will, the battle of motives, the swelling

current of passions,1 as a profusion of vividly moving lines and figures and he could thereby tap

into the most delicate mysteries of unconscious impulses. While he thus becomes conscious of a

supreme intensification of his drives toward visibility and transfiguration, he nevertheless feels

just as certainly that this long series of Apollonian artistic effects still does not engender that

contented abiding in will-less contemplation, which the sculptor and the epic poet, hence the

properly Apollonian artists, produce in him with their artworks: that means the justification of

the world of the individuatio2 attained in that contemplation, which as such is the pinnacle and

epitome of Apollonian art. He looks upon the transfigured world of the stage and nevertheless

renounces it. He sees the tragic hero before him in epic distinctness and beauty and indeed

delights in his annihilation. He grasps the action3 of the scene at its innermost and happily takes

refuge in the incomprehensible. He feels the actions of the heroes [141] as justified and is

nevertheless still more elevated, if these actions annihilate their author. He shudders before the

suffering, which the heroes will encounter and yet anticipates a higher, much more overpowering

pleasure for them. He sees much more and more deeply than before and nevertheless wishes he

would go blind. From where will we have to derive this wonderful split within the self, this

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overturning of the Apollonian apex, if not from out of that Dionysian magic which, while

optimally stimulating the Apollonian impulses toward semblance, is still nevertheless able to

compel this exuberance of Apollonian force into its service. The tragic myth is only to be

understood as an illustration of Dionysian wisdom by Apollonian artistic means; it leads the

world of appearance to the limits, where it renounces itself and seeks to flee back into the womb

of the true and sole reality; where it then, with Isolde, appears to begin its metaphysical

swansong:

In the blissful ocean’s

roiling swell,

in the fragrant waves’

resounding ringing,

in the world breath’s

fluttering All —

to drown — to sink —

unconscious — highest pleasure!4

Thus,5 with the experiences of the truly aesthetic listener, we imagine for ourselves the tragic

artist himself, as he, like an extravagant deity of individuatio, creates his figures, in which sense

his work can hardly be grasped as an “imitation of nature” — but then, his tremendous

Dionysian drive engulfs this entire world of appearances, in order, behind it and through its

annihilation, to allow for the intimation of the highest primordial artistic joy in the womb of the

primordial one. Certainly our aestheticians have nothing to report about this return to the

primordial homeland, about the fraternal bond of the two artistic divinities in tragedy6 and of the

excitation of the audience member which is as much Apollonian as Dionysian, [142] for they do

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not tire of characterizing what is properly tragic as the struggle of the hero against fate, the

victory of the moral world-order or the discharging of affects brought about by tragedy: such7

indefatigability leads me to think, they do not at all want to be aesthetically excitable human

beings and perhaps when listening to tragedy want only to be considered as moral beings. There

has still never been, since Aristotle, an explanation of the tragic effect from which the artistic

states, the aesthetic activity of the audience member could be inferred. Soon pity and fearfulness

are to be forced by the serious events into an alleviating discharge, soon we are to feel elevated

and animated by the victory of good and noble principles, by the sacrifice of the hero in the name

of a moral world view; and I believe quite certainly that for numerous human beings it is

precisely this and only this that is the effect of tragedy, from which it clearly follows that all of

them, together with their interpreting aestheticians, have experienced nothing of tragedy as the

highest art. That pathological discharge, the catharsis8 of Aristotle, about which philologists do

not really know whether it should be counted as a medical or a moral phenomenon, reminds one

of a remarkable insight of Goethe’s. “Without a lively pathological interest,” he says, “I could

never even succeed in working up a tragic situation, and I have therefore rather avoided than

sought it. May it not have been one of the advantages of the ancients, that the highest pathos was

with them only an aesthetic play, while with us natural truth must cooperate in order to produce

such a work?”9 After our splendid experiences, we are now able to respond affirmatively to this

quite profound final question, in keeping with which we have experienced precisely in musical

tragedy and to our astonishment, how really what is most pathos-laden can be merely an

aesthetic play: for which reason we may believe that [143] only now is the primordial

phenomenon of the tragic to be described with some success. Now whoever still merely speaks

of those vicarious effects in terms of extra-aesthetic domains and fails to feel elevated out of the

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pathological-moral process, can only despair of his aesthetic nature: for which we recommend to

him as innocent ersatz the interpretation of Shakespeare after the manner of Gervinus and the

diligent tracking down of “poetic justice.”10

Thus with the rebirth of tragedy, even the aesthetic audience member is reborn, in whose

place there previously tended to be seated in the theatrical houses a curious quid-pro-quo,11 one

with half moral and half scholarly pretensions, the “critic.” In his circles up to this point,

everything was artificial and only whitewashed with a semblance of life. The performing artist

no longer knew in fact how to get started with such a critically posturing audience member,

and thus he, along with the dramatist or opera composer who inspired him, searched uneasily

about for the last remnants of life in this being, pretentiously barren and incapable of enjoyment.

But the audience previously consisted of just such “critics;” the student, the schoolboy, yes even

the most harmless womanly creature had been unwittingly prepared by education and the

newspapers for a similar perception of an artwork. With such an audience, the more noble

natures among the artists counted on the exciting of moral-religious forces, and there where

actually a potent artistic magic should have enchanted12 the genuine audience members, the call

for a “moral world-order” vicariously arose. Or some grandiose, or at least exciting tendency of

the political and social present was so distinctly recited by the dramatist, that the audience

member was able to forget his critical exhaustion and surrender himself to similar affects, as in

patriotic or wartime moments, or before the podium of the parliament or in the condemnation of

crimes or vice: such an alienation [144] of proper artistic intentions must lead here and there

straight to a cult of tendentiousness. But here there arose, what has ever arisen with all such

artificial arts, a slashingly swift deterioration of those tendencies, so that for example the

tendency toward using the theater as an institution for the moral education of the people, which

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was taken seriously in Schiller’s day,13 is already being counted among those suspect antiquities

of an outmoded culture. While14 the critic came to dominance in the theater and the concert hall,

the journalist in the school, and the press in society, art degenerated into a diversionary object of

the lowest kind, and aesthetic criticism became used as the glue for an idle, distracted, egotistical

and what is more an impoverished-unoriginal sociality, the sense of which that Schopenhaurian

parable of the porcupines15 would make quite clear; such that at no time has so much been

prattled about art and so little esteemed of art. But can one still encounter a human who is in a

position to discuss Beethoven and Shakespeare? Let each answer this question according to his

own sentiment: he will in any case demonstrate with his answer, what he understands by

“culture,” assuming that he even attempts to answer the question and is not simply dumbfounded

with surprise.16

Against this, someone more nobly and sensitively endowed by nature, even if he has

gradually become a critical barbarian in the way sketched here, would have to tell of the effect,

as unexpected as it is wholly incomprehensible, that something like a well-executed performance

of Lohengrin, for example, exerted upon him: only that there was lacking any hand that might

have taken hold of him, admonishing and interpreting, so that even the inconceivably varied and

thoroughly incomparable sensation that shook him at that time remained singular and like an

enigmatic star expired after a brief illumination. He had an intimation at that time of what an

aesthetic audience member would be.

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[145] Whoever is willing to examine thoroughly for himself to what degree he is related to the

true aesthetic listener or belongs to the community of Socratic-critical human beings, he need

only sincerely ask himself about the feeling with which he receives the miracle presented upon

the stage: whether he feels his historical sense, focused upon rigorous psychological causality,

somewhat insulted by this, whether he admits the miracle with a benevolent concession, so to

speak, as a phenomenon understandable in childhood, but now alien to him, or whether he

undergoes thereby something else entirely. Precisely by this will he be able to measure how

capable he is of understanding the myth at all, the condensed world image, which, as an

abbreviation of the appearance, cannot do without the miracle. What is probable, however, is that

almost everyone, on rigorous examination, feels themselves so degraded by the critical-

historical1 spirit of our culture that they can only make the former existence of myth credible for

themselves along scholarly lines, through mediated abstractions. But without myth every culture

is deprived of its healthy productive natural force: it is only a horizon surrounded with myth that

renders an entire cultural movement into a unity. All forces of imagination and of the Apollonian

dream are first saved from their indiscriminate wandering by myth. Mythic images must be the

unnoticed ever present daemonic guardian, under whose protection the young soul grows up, by

whose signs man interprets his life and his struggles: and even the state knows no more powerful

unwritten laws than the mythical foundation, which guarantees its connection with religion, its

growth out of mythic representations.

Were one now to pose alongside this the abstract human being, without the guidance of

myths, abstract education, abstract morals, abstract justice, the abstract state: one would realize

[146] the unruly wandering of the artistic imagination, when curbed by no native myth: one

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would conceive of a culture, which has no fixed and holy primordial seat, but is rather

condemned to exhausting all possibilities and nourishing itself wretchedly on all cultures — such

is the present, the result of that Socratism directed at the annihilation of myth. And now the

mythless human, eternally hungering, stands among all past eras and, digging and rummaging

about, searches for roots, even if he must dig for them in the most far flung antiquity. The

monstrous historical need of dissatisfied modern culture, which gathers about it countless other

cultures, the consuming wanting to know, point to what if not to the loss of myth, to the loss of

the mythic homeland, of the mythic maternal womb? One might ask whether the feverish and

thus uncanny agitation of this culture is anything other than the greedy grasping and clutching-

after-food of the starving man — and who would want to give something more to such a culture,

which is not to be sated even with everything it swallows up and by whose contact the most

powerful, most healthy nourishment tends to be transformed into “history and criticism”?

Painfully, one would even have to despair of our German essence, if it were already in

the same way indissolubly entangled with, indeed become one with, its culture, as we can

observe to our horror in civilized France; and what for a long time was the great advantage of

France and the cause of its prodigious ascendancy, precisely that unity of people and culture,

may compel us, in view of this, to extol our good fortune, in that our so questionable culture has

thus far had nothing in common with the noble core of our people’s character. All our hopes

extend much more yearningly toward perceiving that under this restless cultural life and its

educational convulsions, twitching back and forth, a magnificent, internally healthy, primordial

force lies sheltered, [147] which, to be sure, only in tremendous moments first moves violently

and then turns again toward dreaming of a future awakening. From this abyss the German

Reformation grew: in whose chorale the future melodies of German music first rang out. So

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deep, brave and soulful, so effusively good and tender resounded this chorale of Luther, as the

first Dionysian mating call that issues forth, at the approach of spring, from out of the densely

overgrown thicket. To it there responded in a rivaling echo that consecrated overzealous

procession of Dionysian enthusiasts, whom we have to thank for German music — and whom

we will have to thank for the rebirth of German myth!

I know that I must now lead the friend, who has been following sympathetically along, to

an elevated place of solitary observation, where he will have only a few companions, and shout

to him encouragingly that we have to hold fast to our illustrious guides, the Greeks. Up to this

point, for the purification of our aesthetic understanding, we have borrowed from them that pair

of divine images, each of which rules over its own separate aesthetic realm and about whose

reciprocal contact and intensification we gained an insight through Greek tragedy. A remarkable

rending of the two artistic primordial drives had to appear to us to precipitate the downfall of

Greek tragedy: a degeneration and transformation of the Greek popular character accorded with

this occurrence, requiring of us a serious reflection on how necessarily and intimately the art and

the people, myth and morals, tragedy and state, had grown together in their foundations. That

downfall of tragedy was at the same time the downfall of myth. Up to then the Greeks were

involuntarily obliged to connect immediately to their myths everything they experienced, indeed

to conceive it only through this connection: whereby even what was most closely present to them

had to appear immediately sub specie aeterni2 and in a certain sense as timeless. Into this river of

the timeless, however, [148] the state just as much as art is dipped, in order to find in it calm

from the burden and the greed of the moment. And a people — just like a person incidentally —

has value only and precisely to the extent that it is able to press the stamp of eternity upon its

experiences: for thereby it is, so to speak, de-worlded and shows its unconscious inner conviction

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concerning the relativity of time and the true, i.e., metaphysical meaning of life. The opposite of

this happens, when a people begins to conceive of itself historically and to topple the mythic

bullworks all around it: there is commonly bound up with this a decisive secularization, a break

with the unconscious metaphysics of its earlier existence, in all its ethical consequences. Above

all, Greek art and especially Greek tragedy held up the annihilation of myth: one had to

annihilate these as well, in order to be able live set loose from the native soil, unleashed into the

wilderness of thought, of morals and of deed. Even now that metaphysical drive still attempts to

produce for itself a form of transfiguration, albeit attenuated, in the Socratism of science that

presses toward life: but at the lower stages this same drive leads only to a feverish searching,

which gradually loses itself in a pandemonium of myths and superstitions thrown together from

all around:3 in the middle of which the Hellene nevertheless sat with disquieted heart, until he

understood, with Greek cheerfulness and Greek levity, as a Graeculus, how to mask that fever or

fully anesthetize himself in some sultry Oriental superstition.

Since the revival of Alexandrian-Roman antiquity in the fifteenth century, after a long

difficult to describe intermission, we have approached this condition in the most conspicuous

way. At the highpoint, the same overabundant desire for knowledge, the same unsated pleasure

in discovery, the same monstrous secularization, alongside a homeless wandering about, a

greedy imposition of oneself at foreign tables, a [149] frivolous deification of the present or an

apathetic anesthetized aversion, all sub specie saeculi,4 all under the aspect of the “now-time”:

which5 same symptoms suggest a similar deprivation at the heart of this culture, the annihilation

of myth. It seems scarcely possible to transplant a foreign myth with lasting success, without

irreparably damaging the tree by this transplanting: which6 perhaps at some point is again strong

and healthy enough to excise that foreign element through a fearful struggle, but is commonly

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forced to consume itself ailing and stunted or in a sickly proliferation. We have so much regard

for the pure and strong core of the German essence, that we dare to expect of it precisely such an

excising of the violently implanted foreign elements and we regard it as possible for the German

spirit to recollect itself on its own. Someone will perhaps maintain that this spirit must begin its

battle by excising the Romance element: for which he may recognize in the victorious bravery

and bloody glory of the last war an external preconfiguration and an encouragement, but he must

seek inner necessitation in the competitive urge to be ever worthy of our sublime predecessors in

fighting along this path, Luther as well as our great artists and poets. But never would he believe

himself able to fight battles such as these without his household gods, without his mythical

homeland, without a “restoration” of all things German! And if the German should look timidly

around for a leader, to bring him back again to that long lost homeland, whose trails and

footpaths he scarcely knows any longer — let him then only listen to the delightfully alluring call

of the Dionysian bird, which hovers above him and wants to point out to him the way.7

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 24.

[149] We have emphasized an Apollonian deception among the artistic effects characteristic of

musical tragedy, [150] through which we were supposed to be saved from an immediate

unification with Dionysian music, while our musical excitement could discharge itself in an

Apollonian region and in an intervening visible middle world. With this we believed to have

observed how through this very discharge that middle world of the scenic process, the drama as

such, becomes outwardly visible and understandable from within to a degree unattainable in all

other Apollonian art: such that, where this had been elated and elevated through the spirit of

music, so to speak, we must recognize the highest intensification of music’s forces and thereby

in that fraternal bond of Apollo and Dionysus the pinnacle of Apollonian as well as Dionysian

artistic intentions.

Admittedly the Apollonian projection, precisely due to its inner illumination through

music, did not achieve the characteristic effect of the weaker grades of Apollonian art; what the

epic or the animated stone1 is capable of, forcing the intuiting eye to that calm delight in the

world of the individuatio, could not be attained here, despite a higher animation and distinctness.

We examined the drama and pressed with a penetrating gaze into its turbulent inner world of

motives — and yet for us, it was only as if an analogical image had been draped before us,

whose deepest sense we believed we almost surmised and which we wished to pull back like a

curtain, so as to peek at the archetype behind it. The brightest distinctness of the image did not

satisfy us: for this appeared to reveal something as well as veil it; and while it appeared with its

analogical revelation to demand the rending of the veil, the disclosing of the mysterious

background, the eye was nonetheless enchanted by that transparent omnivisibility and prevented

from penetrating more deeply.

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 Whoever has not experienced this, at one and the same time having to see and yearning

past that which is seen, will hardly be able to imagine how definitely and clearly these two

processes [151] coexist alongside one another and are felt alongside one another in the

contemplation of tragic myth: while the truly aesthetic spectator will confirm for me that among

the peculiar effects of tragedy the most remarkable may well be that juxtaposition. Transcribe

this phenomenon of the aesthetic spectator into an analogous process in the tragic artist, and one

will have understood the genesis of tragic myth. It shares with the Apollonian sphere of art the

full pleasure in semblance and in seeing but at the same time it renounces this pleasure and takes

a still higher satisfaction in the annihilation of the visible world of semblance. The content of

tragic myth is at first an epic event with the glorification of battling heroes: but where does it

come from, that feature curious in itself, that the suffering that is the fate of the heroes, the most

painful defeats, the most agonizing conflicts in motivations, in short, the exemplification of that

wisdom of Silenus, or, aesthetically expressed, the hateful and discordant, is ever presented

anew, in such innumerable forms, with such fondness and precisely in the most luxuriant and

youthful age of a people, if not that precisely in all of this a higher pleasure is perceived?2

For that things happen so tragically in life would least of all explain the emergence of an

art form; provided that art is not merely the imitation of natural reality, but rather precisely a

metaphysical supplement to natural reality, set alongside it for its own overcoming. Tragic myth,

insofar as it belongs to art at all, even takes full part in the metaphysical transfiguring purpose of

art in general: but what does it transfigure if it brings the world of appearance under the image of

the suffering hero? Least3 of all the “reality” of this world of appearance, for it says to us

directly: “Look closely! Look very closely! This is your life! This is the hour hand on the clock

of your existence!”

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 And myth showed us this life in order thereby [152] to transfigure it before us? If not,

however, wherein lies that aesthetic pleasure with which even these images pass before us? I ask

after the aesthetic pleasure and know quite well that many of these images are also sometimes

able to engender a moral satisfaction, perhaps in the form of compassion or an ethical triumph.

But whoever wants to derive the effect of the tragic solely from these moral springs, as was

admittedly common in aesthetics for all too long, he should just not believe he has done anything

for art thereby: which throughout its domain necessarily requires purity above all else. For the

explication of tragic myth, the first demand is to seek its proper pleasure in the purely aesthetic

sphere, without crossing over into the region of compassion, fear, the ethical-sublime. How can

the hateful and the discordant, the content of the tragic myth, arouse an aesthetic pleasure?4

Now here it becomes necessary for us to lunge forward with a bold approach into a

metaphysics of art, whereby I repeat the previous claim that only as an aesthetic phenomenon do

existence and the world appear justified: in which case, tragic myth has to convince us that even

the hateful and discordant is an artistic game that the will plays with itself, in the eternal fullness

of its pleasure. This difficult to grasp primordial phenomenon of Dionysian art, however,

becomes uniquely understandable in a direct way and immediately conceived in the wonderful

significance of musical dissonance: how everywhere only music, placed alongside the world, can

give a conception of what is to be understood with the justification of the world as an aesthetic

phenomenon. The pleasure produced by tragic myth has the same homeland as the pleasurable

sensation of dissonance in music.5 The Dionysian, with its primordial pleasure perceived even in

pain, is the common womb of music and tragic myth.

[153] Since we appealed to the musical relation of dissonance for aid, has that difficult

problem of the effect of tragedy in the meantime become appreciably easier? Indeed, we now

150
understand what it means in tragedy to want to see and at the same time to yearn for what is out

beyond seeing: a condition which, as pertains to artistically applied dissonance, we would have

to characterize thusly, that we want to hear and at the same time yearn for what is out beyond

hearing. This striving into the infinite, the wing beat of longing, even at the greatest pleasure in a

clearly perceived actuality, recalls thereby that we have to recognize in both conditions a

Dionysian phenomenon, which always again reveals to us anew the playful construction and

destruction of the world of the individual as the emanation of a primordial pleasure, similar to

when Heraclitus the Obscure compares the world-building force to a child, playfully setting

stones here and there, and constructing sandcastles only to smash them again.6

In order therefore to evaluate correctly the Dionysian capacity of a people, we need to

consider not only the music of a people, but just as necessarily the tragic myth of this people as

the second production of that capacity. With this most intimate relationship between music and

myth, it is now to be surmised in a like manner that a degeneration and depravation of the one

will be connected with the atrophying of the other: provided that a attenuation of the Dionysian

capacity actually comes to expression in the weakening of myth. Regarding the two, however, a

glance at the development of the German essence should not leave us in doubt: in opera as in the

abstract character of our mythless existence, in an art reduced to delectation, as in a life led

according to concepts, the inartistic, life-consuming nature of Socratic optimism has unveiled

itself for us. To our consolation, however, there are indications that, in spite of this, the German

spirit [154] still rests and dreams in an inaccessible abyss, undisturbed in splendid health,

profundity and Dionysian strength, like a knight sunk down in slumber: from which abyss

Dionysian song rises up to us, in order to make us understand that this German knight even now

still dreams his primordial Dionysian myth in blessed-serious visions. Let no one believe that the

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German spirit has lost its mythic homeland forever, if it so clearly still understands the birdsong

that tells of this homeland. Some day it will find itself awakened, in all the freshness of morning,

from a tremendous sleep: then it will slay dragons, annihilate the spiteful dwarf and awaken

Brünnhilde — and Wotan’s spear itself will not be able to thwart his path!7

My friends, you, you who believe in Dionysian music, you also know what tragedy

means for us. In it we have, reborn from music, tragic myth — and in it you may hope for

everything and forget what is most painful! The most painful thing for us all however — the long

degradation under which the German genius has lived, alienated from house and homeland, in

service of the spiteful dwarf. You understand the word — as you also, in conclusion, will

understand my hopes.

152
 25.

[154] Music and tragic myth are equally expressions of the Dionysian capacity of a people and

are inseparable from one another. Both stem from a realm of art which lies beyond the

Apollonian; both transfigure a region in whose pleasurable chords dissonance just as much as the

horrible world image alluringly fades away; both play with the spur of displeasure, trusting in

their exceedingly powerful magic arts; both justify through this play the existence of even the

“worst of worlds.”1 Here the Dionysian shows itself, measured by the Apollonian, [155] as the

eternal and originary power of art that everywhere calls into existence the whole world of

appearance: in the middle of which a new transfiguration of semblance is necessary, so as to

keep the animated world of individuation alive. Were we able to think an incarnation of

dissonance — and what is the human otherwise? — then this dissonance, in order to be able to

live, would need a grandiose illusion, which would cover over its own essence for it with a veil

of beauty. This is the true artistic purpose of Apollo: in whose name we draw together all those

innumerable illusions of beautiful semblance, which at every moment make existence at all

worth living and urge us on to the experience of the next moment.

At the same time, only precisely that much of the foundation of all existence, of that

Dionysian subterranean ground of the world may enter into the consciousness of the human

individual as can again be overcome by that Apollonian force of transfiguration, so that this pair

of artistic drives are required to deploy their forces in rigorous reciprocal proportion, according

to the law of eternal justice. Where the Dionysian powers rise up as tumultuously as we now

experience them, there too must Apollo have already descended to us, veiled in a cloud; the most

luxurious beautiful effects of which will indeed be seen by a coming generation.

153
 That this effect however would be necessary, anyone would most certainly glean by

intuition, if he once, even in a dream, felt himself transported back into an ancient Hellenic

existence: on a stroll among high Ionian colonnades, glancing up to a horizon cropped by pure

and noble lines, alongside him reflections of his transfigured form in lustrous marble, all about

him people solemnly striding or tenderly moved, with harmoniously resounding calls and a

rhythmic gestural language — would he not, at this continuous influx of beauty, have to raise his

hand and call out to Apollo: “Blessed people [156] of the Hellenes! How great must Dionysus be

among you, if the Delian god deems such magic necessary, in order to heal your dithyrambic

madness!”2 — To one so attuned, however, an elderly Athenian, glancing up to him with the

sublime eye of an Aeschylus, might be permitted to respond: “But tell me also this, you

miraculous stranger: how much must this people have suffered, to be able to become so

beautiful! Now however follow me to the tragedy and sacrifice with me in the temple of both

divinities!”

154
The Birth of Tragedy

Already in Leipzig, Winter 1868–69, Nietzsche was occupied with the topic of his later book on

tragedy, The Birth of Tragedy from out of the Spirit of Music (= BT). The Greek pessimism that

was to be resurrected in Schopenhauer’s philosophy; Sophocles’ rebirth in Wagner’s drama of

the future; music as key to all philosophy of art: thus did Heinrich Romundt describe the topics

of conversation from that time with his friend in his letter to Nietzsche of 4 May 1869 (KGB II/2,

8; cf., Chronology). To be sure, notes on Greek tragedy are first recorded in Nietzsche’s Nachlaß

in autumn, 1869, and indeed as preparation for the two lectures: “Greek Music-drama” (= GMD)

and “Socrates and Tragedy” (= ST), which Nietzsche held in Basel on 18 January and 1 February

1870 respectively (see the Chronology in CW 19). The relation of poesy to the art of tone, the

significance of the chorus in Greek “music-drama,” as well as the origin of the latter from out of

the cult of Dionysus was treated in the first lecture; in the second, the death of tragedy at the

hands of Socratism and the “conscious aesthetic” of Euripides. The treatise “The Dionysian

Worldview” (= DW) from summer 1870 (a partial transcription with few variations “The Birth of

Tragic Thinking” from December 1870), first introduced the decisive oppositional pair

“Apollonian-Dionysian” as key to the interpretation of Greek tragedy. DW thus presents an

innovation in Nietzsche’s course of thought and a complete overturning of GMD, while, along

with this, the thematic of ST persists, though in a supplemental role. The next thoroughgoing

reworking occurred at the beginning of 1871, namely during Nietzsche’s stay in Lugano. Here

Nietzsche attempted to merge his previous sketches with two main paths of thought (Apollonian-

Dionysian, the death of tragedy by Socratism) into a unified treatise with the title Origin and Aim

of [42] Tragedy (in notebook U I 2). The treatment of the social background of Greek culture led

to an expansion of DW, which is handed down to us also as a continuous Bogen-manuscript with

155
the following contents: foreword to Richard Wagner, dated Lugano, 22 February 1871 (cf. CW

10: 351–58, Fr. 11[1]); the later chapters 1–4 from BT; fragment 10 [1] on the Greek state (KSA

7: 333–49), which Nietzsche himself later named “Fragment of an Expanded Form of the Birth

of Tragedy.” The continuation of this was another bound manuscript, whose contents exactly

correspond to those of the essay, “Socrates and Greek Tragedy” (= SGT), later published in a

private printing, and which is to be regarded as a reworking and expansion of ST. Shortly

thereafter Nietzsche altered the beginning of the first manuscript, leaving out fragment 10 [1]

and replacing it by the later chapter 6, as well as fragment 12 [1] (KSA 7: 359–69). The whole,

which now assumed the form of a manuscript with pages 1 to 59, looked thus: 11 [1] + BT 1, 2,

3, 4, 5, 6, + 12 [1] (the conclusion — KSA 7: 368.02–369.33 — thus fell away) + SGT. Hans

Joachim Mette published this manuscript under the title: Socrates and Greek Tragedy: Original

Draft of “The Birth of Tragedy from out of the Spirit of Music” (Munich{: Beck,} 1933).

On 20 April 1871, Nietzsche sent the publisher Wilhelm Engelmann in Leipzig “the

beginning” of a “brochure filling approximately 90 printer’s pages” with the title Music and

Tragedy. Hans Joachim Mette, to whom we are indebted in many ways for our reconstruction,

falsely believed that here it was a matter of the definitive manuscript of BT. The following facts

speak against this hypothesis: Engelmann hesitated almost two months with his answer, for

which reason, at the beginning of June, Nietzsche published the brochure Socrates and Greek

Tragedy (= SGT) in a private printing. A side remark to this: though this brochure is not to be

confused with the publication by Mette, it nonetheless constitutes its second part; the title

Socrates and Greek Tragedy, which Mette gave to his publication, was placed in front of the

Lugano foreword to Richard Wagner (fragment 11 [1]), in his manuscript paginated from 1 to

59. The same manuscript was later repaginated by Nietzsche, as he converted it into the final

156
draft of The Birth of Tragedy, chapters 1–15. In June 1871, as SGT appeared in a private

printing, the repagination for the final text of BT was not yet completed, as one can confirm from

the text of SGT (cf. the notes to this text). Thus, on April 20, Nietzsche would not yet have been

able to send the final printer’s manuscript of BT to Leipzig. Far rather would he have sent

Engelmann today’s chapters 1–6 from BT and fragment 12 [1], i.e., the first half of the

manuscript paginated 1 to 59, nevertheless without the Lugano foreword and the old title and

with the (later crossed out) new title, legible even today above chapter 1: Music and Tragedy: A

Series of Aesthetic Observations, which he mentioned in the accompanying letter to Engelmann

from 20 April 1871.

No agreement was reached with Engelmann; although he had already declared, even at

the end of June 1871, that he would print Nietzsche’s work (cf. H. Romundt to Nietzsche, 28

June 1871, KGB II: 2, 394). In summer/fall 1871 the printer’s manuscript of BT assumed its final

form. The Birth of Tragedy from out of the Spirit of Music appeared at the beginning of 1872

with Wagner’s publisher Ernst Wilhelm Fritzsch in Leipzig. As printer’s manuscript for the

second edition (printed 1874, in bookstores first 1878), Nietzsche used a copy of the first

printing from 1872, in which he entered the emendations and alterations. BT appeared in 1886 as

a “new edition”: The Birth of Tragedy, or: Hellenism and Pessimism…New Edition with the

Attempt at Self-Criticism (Leipzig{: Fritzsch,} n.d. [1886]). Nietzsche altered nothing in the text;

the remaining on hand copies of both editions (even the first!) just had the “Attempt at Self-

Criticism” pasted to the front (with roman paginated pages), the “Foreword to Richard Wagner”

(also paginated roman) thus fell away.

In the following commentary the abbreviations mean:

Pm1 Printer’s manuscript of the first edition of 1872

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Fe1 First printing 1872

Pm2 Printer’s manuscript of the second edition (1874/78), i.e., the first printing of 1872

corrected by Nietzsche

Fe2 First printing 1874/78

In the commentary, references are at times made to Nachlaß fragments which belong in the same

orbit of thought with The Birth of Tragedy, 1869–1871, and are translated in CW 10. Unlike

fragments from other volumes, these will be introduced without information about the volume

and merely by fragment number.

An Attempt at Self-Criticism
1
Cf. CW 16, 2 [110, 111, 113, 114], 355–59; W I 8, 107 (First draft): Perhaps I would now

speak more carefully and less confidently about such difficult psychological questions as that of

the origin of tragedy among the Greeks. A basic question is the relationship of the Greek to pain,

his degree of sensitivity: and whether his demand for beauty has awakened out of a demand for

self-deception in semblance, out of an anti-will against “truth” and “actuality.” This I believed at

that time; now I would find in this an expression of personal romanticism ( — in accord with

this, I was admittedly condemned for a time to fall under the spell of the greatest of all romantics

— ). — What significance does Dionysian madness have for the Greeks? This problem had not

been felt at all by philologists and friends of antiquity; I located in its solution the question

concerning the intelligibility of the Greek essence in general. — The Greeks, taken as the most

well-developed and strongest types of the human hitherto: how does pessimism relate to them? Is

this merely a symptom of poor upbringing? and, if this too is not lacking among the Greeks, it

appears perhaps as the sign of diminishing force, as approaching old age, as physiological

158
depravity? No, entirely the reverse: the Greeks, in the fulness of their powers, in the surplus of

their youthful health, are pessimists: with the growth of weakness, they become exactly more

optimistic, more superficial, more fervent for logic and the rendering-logical of the world. —

Problem: how so? is optimism itself perhaps a symptom of the feeling of weakness? — thus do I

experience Epicurus — as a sufferer. [108] The will to pessimism is the sign of strength and

rigor: one does not fear admitting the frightful. Behind this stands the courage, the pride, the

demand for a great enemy. This was my new perspective. — It is a shame that at that time I did

not yet have the courage, in every observation, to use my own language for such idiosyncratic

intuitions: and that I sought to express in Schopenhauerian formulations things that could not

have corresponded with anything experienced within the Schopenhauerian soul: indeed, one

should hear how Schopenhauer speaks of Greek tragedy — and how distant and false must such

a despondent, moral resignationism seem to an acolyte of Dionysus. — It is an even greater

shame that I sullied the grandiose Greek problem by the admixture of the most modern things —

that I attached hopes to the most un-Greek of all possible art movements, the Wagnerian, and

began to fabricate stories about the German essence, as if it were just about to discover itself. In

the meantime, I learned unsparingly enough how to think of this “German essence,” and likewise

of the dangers of German music — which is a frayer of the nerves of the first rank and, for a

people who loves intoxication and treats unclarity as a virtue, in its double property as

intoxicating and befogging — is doubly dangerous. — Where is there today an equal morass of

unclarity and sick mysticism as among the Wagnerians? There was for me fortunately an hour of

epiphany about this, about where I would belong — : that hour, when Richard Wagner spoke to

me of the delights he knew how to wrest from the Christian Eucharist. Later, he even added

159
music to it [or for it] . . . [For the first paragraph of W I 8, 108: “The will to pessimism . . . new

perspective,” cf. HAH II, Preface 7 {CW 4, 10}].

2
Franco-German war of 1870/71] {Better known as the Franco-Prussian war or, in France, the

War of 1870, the Franco-German war (19 July 1870 to 10 May 1871) was occasioned by the

Prussian prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, strategically provoking the French (led by Emperor

Napoleon III) into a declaration of war by intentionally misreporting a diplomatic meeting in a

manner humiliating to the French and arranging for the story to be widely publicized by the

European press. In response to the declaration, Prussia invaded northeast France. Bismarck

correctly predicted that a war would unite the independent southern German states with Prussia

and the other smaller states allied with it in Bismarck’s Northern German Confederation,

effectively creating, for the first time, a unified Germany. The French were no match for the

Prussian troops which enjoyed a relatively swift victory, gaining Alsace-Lorraine from France in

the process. The siege of Paris, with the city surrounded by Prussian troops, led to a collapse of

the government and the creation of the short-lived Paris Commune.}

3
Battle of Wörth] {On 6 August 1870, one of the opening battles of the Franco-Prussian War

was fought near the town of Wörth. The Prussian forces greatly outnumbered the French which

led to a rapid victory. Both sides suffered heavy losses, however, with almost half of the French

troops either fallen, captured, or wounded.}

4
much concerned and unconcerned] {For his part, Nietzsche met the prospect of war with a

combination of despair and exuberance, culminating in his time as a field medical assistant. His

experiences are documented in his letters. See Translators’ Afterword.}

5
about the Greeks] {Nietzsche is referring to his unpublished essay, “The Dionysian

Worldview” (see below, XXX), which was composed during the summer of the war. It was this

160
essay that “introduced the decisive oppositional pair ‘Apollonian-Dionysian’ as the key to the

interpretation of Greek tragedy,” which lies at the center of The Birth of Tragedy (see

Montinari’s preliminary remarks, above). See Translators’ Afterword.}

6
As the thunder . . . to be dedicated.] First draft, W I 8, 97: As the thunder of the Battle of Wörth

rolled across a stunned Europe — in some corner of the Alps I wrote down the decisive thought

of this book: at base, not so much for me, as for Richard Wagner, since up to that point, no one

had given special effort to his Greekification and southerliness.

7
beneath the walls of Metz] {Nietzsche is “beneath” the walls of Metz, i.e., on the outside

medically assisting the 150,000 Prussian troops laying siege to Metz (August 19 to October 27,

1870), an ancient walled town (with sections dating back to the second century CE) to which

French forces had retreated.}

8
as the peace . . . Versailles] {The truce ending hostilities was signed by Adolphe Thiers and

Otto von Bismarck in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, France on 26 February 1871. The Franco-

Prussian war was formally concluded by the Treaty of Frankfurt on 10 May 1871.}
9
illness . . . battlefield] {While on his volunteer ambulance duty, Nietzsche contracted dysentery

and diphtheria from his time spent with the wounded. See Translators’ Afterword.}
10
artwork] Pm: problem
11
learn what “fear” is] Play upon Wagner’s Siegfried {In Wagner’s music-drama Siegfried, the

young title character has never known fear. His guardian, the dwarf Mime, goads him into

fighting the dragon, Fafnir, in order to teach him fear and gain the dragon’s treasure for himself.

Siegfried defeats the dragon, exposes Mime, and learns no fear.}

12
Dionysian] {For a discussion of “Dionysian” see BT 1.}
13
Socratism of morals] {See the discussion of Socrates’ condemnation of instinct at BT 13.}

161
14
Epicurean will . . . sufferer?] {According to Epicurus’s hedonistic ethics, pleasure is the only

good for human beings. If one can successfully train oneself to desire only modest and easily

obtained pleasures, one can satisfy one’s desires completely and avoid pain and suffering in most

cases. Indeed, Epicurus even asserts that by doing so one can “live as a god among men.” See

“Letter to Menoeceus,” in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D.

Hicks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 10.135.}

15
Sturm und Drang] “storm and stress” {In the mid to late eighteenth century, the German

literary and artistic movement of Sturm und Drang championed the emotions against the

predominant rationalism of the Enlightenment. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)

and Schiller’s The Robbers (1781) are signal works of the period, which takes its name from a

play by Maximilian Klinger, Storm and Stress (1777).}

16
long” . . . Drang”] Pm: much,” its “never-at-the-right time” {Drang and lang (“long”) rhyme

in German.}
17
“the best of his own age.”] Cf. Schiller, Prologue to Wallenstein’s Camp {in Friedrich

Schiller, The Robbers and Wallenstein, ed. and trans. F. J. Lamport (New York: Penguin Books,

1979), 166: “For he who satisfies the best of his / Own age, has lived for every age to come.”}
18
in artibus] “in the arts”
19
profanum vulgus] “common masses” {This often-cited phrase is found in Horace (Odes 3.1):

“I shun the uninitiated crowd (profanum vulgus) and keep it at a distance.” Horace, Odes and

Epodes, ed. and trans. Niall Rudd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 140–41.}
20
foreign] Pm from: new
21
unknown god] {In his speech on the Areopagus in Athens, Paul remarks on an altar to “an

unknown god” that he had observed passing through the city. He then identifies the divinity of

162
the Christians with this previously nameless god already worshipped by the Greeks (Acts 17: 22–

31).}
22
maenadic] “of or like the maenads” {Maenads are the female followers of Dionysus.}
23
funeral speech] {In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides recounts a stirring

eulogy delivered by Pericles in honor of the first Athenians who died in the war against the

Spartans and their allies (Peloponnesian War, Book 2, §§34–46). Thucydides opens his account

of the oration, saying that “the Athenians, following the custom of their fathers, celebrated at the

public expense the funeral rites of the first who had fallen in this war.” Thucydides, The

Peloponnesian War, Volume 1: Books 1 and 2, trans. C. F. Firth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1919), 2.34.}

24
satyr] {For a discussion of “satyr,” see BT 2, note 4, p. xxx.}
25
those centuries . . . with life?] {See the discussion of “Marathonian fitness in body and soul” at

BT 13, note 3, p. xxx.}

26
And what meaning . . . gatherings?] First draft, W I 8, 109: One of the most difficult

psychological questions: out of what need did the Greeks invent the satyr? On the basis of what

experience? Endemic delights, by which a whole community viewed the god it poetized and

summoned: this appears to be common to all ancient cultures (hallucination, as the painterly-

primal-force, carried over to the community); the procedures, to arrive at such a height of sensual

and adoring excitement.

27
a word of Plato’s] Cf. Phaedrus, 244a; the same citation in HAH {164; CW 3, 126} and D 14

{CW 5, 26}.
28
the provocative claim . . . justified] {See BT 5, p. xxx, and 24, p. xxx.}

163
29
“beyond good and evil”] {Nietzsche’s book, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy

of the Future, was first published in 1886, the same year as this preface.}
30
“perversity of disposition”] Cf. Schopenhauer, Parerga 2, 107 {The phrase is actually found

in the chapter “On Ethics” in Parerga 2, 214/183: “That the world has a mere physical but no

moral significance is the greatest, most ruinous and fundamental error, the real perversity of

disposition and in a basic sense it is certainly that which faith has personified as the antichrist”

(translation modified).}
31
terminus technicus] “technical term”
32
semblance] {For a discussion of “semblance” (Schein), see Translators’ Afterword, p. XXX}
33
what is here] Diesseits {Nietzsche’s term Diesseits literally translates to “this side,” which

names everything of this (mortal) world; we have chosen to render it as “what is here.” It is

contrasted by the term Jenseits, literally “that side,” which is generally rendered as “beyond,” as

in the title, Beyond Good and Evil.}

34
Sabbath of Sabbaths] {This refers to Yom Kippur or the “Day of Atonement,” the holiest day

in the Jewish calendar.}

35
Antichrist] {In the New Testament, the Antichrist is held to be a false prophet and opponent of

Christ at the time of the Apocalypse. The term is also extended to anyone who denies that Jesus

is the son of God (the term is only found in 1 and 2 John). Nietzsche referred to himself as the

Antichrist — “I am, in Greek, but not only in Greek, the Antichrist . . . ” (EH “Books” 2, CW 9,

250) — authored a book by this title, The Antichrist: Curse upon Christianity (written 1888,

published 1895), and signs its concluding “Law Against Christianity” with the name “The

Antichrist” (CW 9, 209).}

164
36
idiosyncratic . . . of my own] {Nietzsche uses eigen twice in this sentence, a term that can

mean both “idiosyncratic, peculiar” as well as “proper, appropriate, one’s own.”}

37
“What gives . . . to resignation.”] Cited from the Frauenstädt edition {World 2: 450,

Nietzsche’s emphasis. Where Schopenhauer has kein wahres Genügen gewähren können (“able

to guarantee no true satisfaction”) Nietzsche writes kein rechtes Genügen geben können (“able to

give no proper satisfaction”), and he also changes the final colon to a dash.}
38
ground bass] {The ground bass (French: basse fundamental, German: Grundbaß) is a

compositional technique for harmonic music devised by Jean-Phillipe Rameau (1683–1764) in

his Treatise on Harmony (1722). The ground bass is an imagined second bass line for a piece of

harmonic music, constructed by taking the tonic notes (“fundamentals”) of each chord in the

progression; in cases where the tonic is not the lowest sounding note in the chord (for example,

in inversions), the tonic bass note is imagined as existing below the sounded chord. The total of

these tonic notes, some sounded, some imagined, make up the “ground bass” line.

The term is then taken up by Schopenhauer in World I (1819), where it serves as a

metaphysical allegory for the most primal workings of the will: “In the lowest notes of harmony,

in the ground bass, I recognize the lowest levels of the objectivation of the will, inorganic nature,

the mass of the planet. All the higher notes, which are brisk, sprightly and die away more

quickly, are known to originate from the secondary vibrations of the deep tonic note {Grundton}

(they always resonate softly with this tonic note) and it is the law of harmony that a bass note

may be accompanied only by those high notes that actually already sound with it on their own

(its sons harmoniques) through these secondary vibrations. Now this is analogous to the fact that

all the natural bodies and organizations must be seen as arising from a stepwise development out

of the planetary mass: this mass is both their support and their source: and this is the same

165
relationship that the higher notes have to the ground bass” (World I, 285). Schopenhauer sums up

his view: “For us, as a result, ground bass is to harmony what inorganic nature is to the world,

the crudest mass on which everything rests and from which all things arise and develop” (World

I, 286).
39
romantic from 1830 . . . pessimism of 1850] {In his notebooks around this time, Nietzsche

sketches a kind of trajectory for late romanticism (both German and French) across the years of

1830–1850. A note from summer 1886–autumn 1887 reads: “That typical metamorphosis, the

most pointed examples of which are provided by G. Fálaubertñ among the French, R. Wáagnerñ

among the German: between 1830 and 1850 the romantic faith in love and the future transformed

into a yearning for nothingness” (CW 17, 5[50]; see also KSA 13: 19, 119). The “pessimism of

1850” may refer to the point at which Schopenhauer, specifically his World as Will and

Representation (1819), became belatedly popular in Germany (see Schmidt, 32).}

40
finale of a romantic . . . old God] {Nietzsche’s observation fits both Friedrich Schlegel, who

converted to Catholicism in 1808, and Richard Wagner, whose final music-drama, Parsifal

(1882), deals with explicitly Christian themes.}

41
Let us consider . . . most singular figure?] Cf. BT 18, xxx. {Nietzsche’s emphasis.}
42
{Cf. CW 7, Z IV, “On the Superior Human,” 17, 18, 20.}

Foreword to Richard Wagner

1
given the peculiar . . . public] Pd: given a presumably mixed readership
2
Prometheus] {According to ancient Greek myth, Prometheus was a Titan (see later note) who

was punished by Zeus for having given human beings fire, technical skill, and the ability to

166
ignore their finitude. Aeschylus’s Prometheia trilogy was comprised of Prometheus Bound,

Prometheus Unbound, and Prometheus Firebringer.}

3
{Cf. Schmidt, 86: “On 7 November 1870, N. wrote to Carl von Gersdorff: ‘Wáagnerñ

sent me a wonderful manuscript titled “Beethoven” a few days ago. Here we have an extremely

deep philosophy of music strictly following Schopenhauer. This treatise appears in honor of

Beethoven — as the highest honor that the nation can pay him’” (KGB II:1, 154). Cf. also N’s

letter of 30 December 1870 to his mother and sister (KGB II:1, 172).}
4
war just broken out] {The war in question is the Franco-Prussian War, see “An Attempt at Self-

Criticism,” note 2.}

5
vortex and turning point] Fe1: a “vortex of their being,”
6
taken so seriously] Fe1: to take
7
my] Pm1 from: the
8
Basel . . . 1871] Omitted in Fe1; Pm1 at the end, crossed out: Friedrich Nietzsche; in Pm1

following P. iii the title: [The Origin] The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music.

Section 1
1
Pm1 at top, centered: [Music and Tragedy. / A Series of Aesthetic Observations.]
2
between the image-maker’s art . . . and the non-imagistic art of music] zwischen der Kunst des

Bildners . . . und der unbildlichen Kunst der Musik {The art of the Bildner encompasses both

sculpture and the graphic arts. Consequently, the term Bildner we have translated as “image

maker” or “sculptor” and the adjective bildnerisch as either “shape-giving” or “sculptural.” We

have translated Bild as “image” and related terms like bildlich and unbildlich as “imagistic” and

“non-imagistic” throughout. The designation bildende Künste we translate with “plastic arts.”}

167
3
in the Greek world . . . Apollonian] Fe1: in Greek art there exists a stylistic opposition: two

different drives running alongside each another, for the most part in conflict and mutually

provoking one another to ever stronger births, in order to perpetuate in these the struggle of that

opposition: until they finally, in a flowering moment for the Hellenic “will,” appear as fused in

the mutual generation of the work of art that is Attic tragedy

4
corresponding to] Fe1: analogous with
5
Lucretius] De rerum natura {5.}1169–82. {Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, edited by M. F.

Smith, translated by W. H. D. Rouse (London and Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,

1975).}
6
and the Hellenic poet . . . interpretations] Fe1: in dreams the Hellenic poet would himself

experience what a profound epigram by Friedrich Hebbel expresses in the following words: Spun

into the real world are many other possible ones, and sleep again unwinds these, Whether in the

dark of night that overtakes all humans, Or in the light of the day that only befalls the poet; And

thus they too come forth so that the All might expend itself, through the human spirit, into a

fluttering existence; cf. CW 10, 7[179].

7
interpretations] {Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (“The Mastersingers of

Nuremberg”), Act 3, scene 2, SSD 7: 235. In Wagner’s Meistersinger (1868), a song contest is to

be held for the hand of Eva, daughter of a wealthy goldsmith. The cobbler and mastersinger Hans

Sachs tutors the young and rawly talented Walther, Eva’s beloved, in the rules of mastersinging.

His song that ultimately wins the contest and her hand comes to him in a dream. Sachs helps him

synthesize his original poetic creation with the constraints of tradition.}

8
images] {Cf. Julius Frauenstädt, ed., Arthur Schopenhauer’s handschriftlichem Nachlaß:

Abhandlungen, Anmerkungen, Aphorismen und Fragmente (“Arthur Schopenhauer’s handwritten

168
literary remains: treatises, remarks, aphorisms and fragments”) (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1864), 295,

NL: “Whoever does not at times find people and all things to be like mere phantoms or shadows,

has no aptitude for philosophy: because that arises from the contrast of individual things with the

idea whose semblance they are. And the idea is only accessible to a heightened consciousness.”

Cf. Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, vol. 3: Berlin Manuscripts (1818–1830), ed. Arthur

Hübscher, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 264.}

9
all-accepting reasonability] Sd, Pm1, Fe1, Pm2, Fe2: Allverständigkeit Le: Allverständlichkeit

[“all-embracing comprehension”] {The German adjective verständig, “reasonable,” is derived

from the noun, Verstand, “understanding.” While the adjective verständlich has the

epistemological sense of something “intelligible” or “understandable,” the adjective verständig

here has more to do with the practical application of the understanding in a common-sense

manner, i.e., with acting in a “sensible” or “reasonable” manner. As such, “reasonable”

(verständig) does not refer to the philosophical faculty of reason, which is Vernunft in German, a

term that does not occur in The Birth of Tragedy apart from a quotation by Schopenhauer (§16,

xxx–xxx). Allverständigkeit has thus been rendered “all-accepting reasonability,” a reasonability

expressed toward all phenomena.}

10
Just as now the philosopher . . . all-accepting reasonability] Fe1: Wherever this sensation of

illusion fully ceases, sickly and pathological effects begin in which the healing natural strength

of the dream condition subsides. Even within those limits, however, it is not only the pleasant

and friendly images that we experience with that all-accepting reasonability

11
inferno] {The Divine Comedy is a fourteenth-century Christian epic poem by Dante Alighieri,

presenting a first-person account of being led through the three regions of the afterlife — the

Inferno or “Hell,” Purgatorio or “Purgatory,” and Paradiso or “Heaven.”}

169
12
past him] Fe1: past us
13
he . . . suffers] Fe1: we live and suffer
14
and perhaps . . . will] Fe1: indeed, I
15
to themselves] Fe1: to myself
16
these facts] Fe1: as such, these facts
17
of all representational arts . . . prophecy] Fe1: of dream representations is at the same time the

god of prophecy and art

18
the “shining” one] {Although now considered questionable, in the nineteenth century it was

common to relate Apollo’s epithet phoibos to the Greek for “light,” phôs, making sense of his

characterization as the “god of light” and the sometimes conflation of Apollo and the Titan sun

god, Helios. It is important to hear in Nietzsche’s description of Apollo as der Scheinende or “the

Shining One” a connection to the term “Schein,” which is often rendered as either “illusion” or

as the legitimate “appearance” of something, an ambivalence reflected by our translation choice,

“semblance.” See the Translators’ Afterword, pp. xxx for a discussion of Schein-related terms.}
19
inner world of fantasy] Fe1: dreamworld
20
to the arts] Fe1: to art
21
possible and worth living] Fe1: worth living and the future is made into the present
22
deceive us and seem] Fe1: not only be deceptive, but even seem
23
His . . . “sunlike”] Fe1: cf. Goethe, Zahme Xenien III: “Were the eye not sunlike, it could

never glimpse the sun” {Zahme Xenien, Dritte Abtheilung (“Placid gifts for the host, Third

section”), in Goethe’s Werke, Vollständige Ausgabe letzter Hand (Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G.

Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1828), 3:291. The entry reads in full: “Were the eye not sunlike, / It

170
could never glimpse the sun; / Did the strength of a god not lie within us, / How could the divine

ever enchant us?”}

24
Schopenhauer] Fe1: our great Schopenhauer
25
Veil of Maya] {Maya or “illusion, unreality” is a term central to the Hindu Vedas and

Upanishads indicating the illusory character of the world of ordinary experience, in which

individuals are “veiled” from their underlying identity, insofar as they appear as distinct from

one another and from their shared source and foundation, the Brahman. Nietzsche sometimes

seems to be following Schopenhauer in casting the Veil of Maya in Kantian terms as the world

of appearances and opposing this to the thing-in-itself.}

26
World . . . 416] Quoted from the third edition (1859), the pagination of which is identical to

the Frauenstädt edition of 1873/74{, the six volumes of which later became part of Nietzsche’s

personal library. World 1, 379.}

27
cliffs of waves] Fe1, Fe2; Welt 1, Le: cliffs of water
28
principium individuationis] “principle of individuation” {For Schopenhauer, the principle

according to which all that appears in the phenomenal world does so as an individuated

appearance, i.e., as spatially-temporally distinct. See World 1: 137–44.}

29
the unshaken] Fe1: the unwavering
30
the marvelous . . . whole] Sd from: the very figure of the principle of individuation, together

with
31
principle of sufficient reason] {The principle of sufficient reason affirms that every being that

exists must have a cause or ground. Schopenhauer’s first book and doctoral dissertation, The

Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813), enumerates four “forms” of this

principle, tracing its application in becoming, knowing, being, and willing.}

171
32
exception] {Welt 1, 417/World 1, 380.}
33
St. Vitus dancers] {St. John’s or St. Vitus’s dance, also known as choreomania (“dancing

mania”), was a widely documented phenomenon occurring across Europe from the 14th to the

17th centuries. According to numerous accounts, large groups of men, women, and children

would spontaneously begin to gyrate and twitch en masse and continue to the point of exhaustion

and collapse. There is no agreed-upon explanation for these events and they have generally been

understood as incidents of mass psychogenic illness.}

34
Sacaea ceremony] {Although its origins are unclear, ancient authors such as Berossus, Strabo,

and Athenaeus describe an autumn festival called the sakaia, which was first celebrated by either

the Babylonians or the Persians. It seems to have functioned like the Roman Saturnalia, insofar

as the social order was inverted for the five days of the festival, servants ruling over masters and

masters obeying their servants.}

35
There are . . . obtuseness,] Pm; Fe1: It is not advisable to
36
turn mockingly and indulgently away] Fe1: to turn mockingly and indulgently away
37
the poor things . . . roaring past] Fe1: we are even thereby given to understand that one is

“healthy” and that those muses who sit at the forest’s edge, Dionysus in their midst, would be

frightened into the bushes or even flee into the waves of the sea if such a healthy “Master

Bottom” suddenly appeared before them — {“Master Bottom” refers to Nick Bottom, a clownish

character who fancies himself a talented actor in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

which takes place outside ancient Athens. Wagner mentions Bottom towards the close of his

“Beethoven” (1872), objecting to those critics “who mostly have experienced that dream-vision

of music intended by us only in the form of Bottom’s dream in the Summernight’s Dream” (SSD

9: 112). Bottom’s dream (the fairy-induced belief that actual events were merely dreamt) is

172
something inarticulable and incomprehensible even to him: “I have had a dream, past the wit of

man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream.

Methought I was — there is no man can tell what. Methought I was — and methought I had —

but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath

not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive,

nor his heart to report, what my dream was.” Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed.

Harold F. Brooks (London: Methuen, 1979), Act 4, scene 1, 204–12.}

38
ode to “joy”] {The final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (Op. 125, 1824) features

a chorus singing lyrics derived from Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy.” Richard Wagner conducted

the symphony many times, the last in 1872 to celebrate the laying of the foundation stone for his

Festspielhaus (festival theater) in Bayreuth.}

39
“impudent fashion”] See Richard Wagner, Beethoven (Leipzig{: Fritzsch,} 1870), 73, NL, for

Beethoven’s alteration of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” {line} 6, see 68ff, 73. {SSD 9: 126, 121–22.

English translation: Richard Wagner, “Beethoven,” in Actors and Singers, ed. and trans. W.

Ashton Ellis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 126, 122–23.}

40
Eleusian Mysteries] {The most important of the various mystery cults practiced by the ancient

Greeks was centered in Eleusis, a suburb of Athens. Every year in early autumn, initiates were

introduced to the Eleusian Mysteries, the secret rites, ceremonies, and beliefs of the cult. The

precise content of what was revealed there about the bondage of embodied human life (the

Lesser Mysteries) and the existence that awaited in the afterlife (the Greater Mysteries) seems to

have been kept successfully secret from the uninitiated. See Schmidt, 123–24.}
41
“Do you bow down . . . world?”] Cf. “Ode to Joy”; omitted in Fe1: “Do you sense . . . world?”

173
Section 2
1
education] Bildung; Pm1: qualification (Befähigung)
2
imitation of nature]: Cf. Aristotle, Poetics, 1447a16.
3
dreaming Greeks as Homer] Fe1: the Greeks as dreaming Homers
4
bearded satyr . . . from the stag] Fe1: stag-legged satyr {In ancient Greek mythology, satyrs

were lustful, drunken, mischievous male creatures, sometimes with a human torso and a horse’s

legs and ears (later those of a goat). Along with maenads, their female counter parts, satyrs

formed the sacred band of Dionysus, trailing along with the god on his travels and worshipping

him in orgiastic rituals.}

5
Doric art] {The Greeks distinguished two specific linguistic and religious subgroups, the

Dorians, which included Spartans, and the Acheans, which included Athenians (see Thucydides,

Peloponnesian War, III.112.4). The art associated with the Dorians is perhaps best represented

by the “Doric” order of columns in architecture, which can be distinguished from the Ionian and

Corinthian orders by their relatively plainer, less adorned, almost austere capitals.}
6
bridged] Pm1, Le: überbrückt; Fe1, Pm2, Fe2: suppressed (überdrückt)
7
apparently . . . as] Fe1: known already as
8
architectonic in tones] {See Count Paul Yorck von Wartenburg, Die Katharsis des Aristoteles

und der “Oedipus Coloneus” des Sophokles (The catharsis of Aristotle and the “Oedipus at

Colonus” of Sophocles) (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1866), 28n3, BB: “The latter {Apollonian}

music takes effect through the architectonic moment in it, the former, Bacchic and tragic music,

through what is purely musical in the music. It is Apollonian music, as ethical and full of

character, which Aristotle recommends as a means of education.” Cf. Reibnitz, Ein Kommentar

zu Friedrich Nietzsche, “Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik” (Kap. 1–12) (“A

174
commentary on Friedrich Nietzsche, “The birth of tragedy from the spirit of music” (chap. 1–

12)”) (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1992), 118.}

9
kithara] {The ancient Greek “kithara,” etymological ancestor of the English term “guitar,” was

a seven-stringed virtuoso instrument, more challenging than the simple lyre. It was associated

specifically with Apollo, who is sometimes depicted in vase-painting and sculpture as Apollo

Kitharoidos, dressed in the traditional robes of a kithara player and holding the instrument. As to

the “suggested” tones (angedeutete: suggested, indicated, implied) of the kithara, Rudolf

Westphal in his Geschichte der alten und mittelalterlichen Musik (History of ancient and

medieval music), NL, describes the role that the kithara played in ancient Greek music: “One can

accompany the song with such an instrument, but the tones of the accompaniment will be of a

very subordinate importance; for the tones of such instruments are always only of a short

duration, they hardly resonate at all, scarcely distinguish between piano {soft} and forte {loud},

allow rapid movements to be executed only with difficulty. Accompaniment by stringed

instruments in ancient music can therefore only have the significance of strengthening the

impression of the song.” Rudolf Westphal, Geschichte der alten und mittelalterlichen Musik

(Breslau: F.E.C. Leuckart, 1865), 95. In Westphal’s 1867 work, Rhythmik und Harmonik nebst

der Geschichte der drei musischen Disciplinen (Rhythmics and harmonics along with a history

of the three artistic disciplines), BB, he adds to his discussion of the kithara that, “how high a

degree the music only contributes, so to speak, suggestively {andeutend mitwirkte}, shows itself

particularly in that the antistrophe is always sung and accompanied by the same music as the

strophe.” Rudolf Westphal, Rhythmik und Harmonik nebst der Geschichte der drei musischen

Disciplinen (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1867), 261.}

10
the unified . . . melody] Omitted in Fe1.

175
Section 3
1
the gables] Fe1: roof and gables
2
its friezes] Fe1: frieze and walls alike
3
Helen] {In Greek mythology, the Greeks led a decade-long siege of Troy, a fortified city near

the west coast of modern-day Turkey, which was believed to have taken place toward the end of

the Mycenaean period, perhaps in the 13th or 12th century, though there is now little scholarly

consensus as to whether any such event took place. The initial impetus for the Trojan War was

said to have been the abduction or seduction of the storied beauty Helen, wife of Menelaus, by

Paris, prince of Troy. In response, Agamemnon, brother of Menelaus, unites the Greek armies to

attack Troy. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are set during and immediately after the war.}
4
“floating in sweet sensuality”] {Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1790), considered

the first Bildungsroman, thematizes the tension between aesthetics and politics. It concerns the

spiritual development of its titular protagonist, who grows from being an actor and dramaturge

into assuming a public role in society. The phrase cited here is spoken by Wilhelm regarding the

character of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm

Meister’s Apprenticeship, ed. and trans. Eric A. Blackall and Victor Lange (New York:

Suhrkamp, 1989), 146, translation modified. See Schmidt 141.}

5
King Midas] {This legendary king of Phrygia was known primarily for his extraordinary greed

and foolishness. Midas was said to have been granted a wish by Dionysus after capturing

Silenus, in asking that everything he touched turn to gold, after which he starved to death due to

transforming all his own food into the precious but inedible metal. See Aristotle, Politics

I.1257b15–17.}

176
6
in order to . . . Olympians] Sd: and veiled them in order to be able to live
7
Titanic] {According to Hesiod, the Titans were an early race of divinities, the mighty children

of the violent union between Gê (Earth) and Ouranos (Sky). His Theogony tells the story of the

battle between the Titans and the Olympian gods, the eventual victory of the latter establishing

the reign of Zeus. See Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, ed. and trans. Glenn W.

Most (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 1–881.}

8
Moira] “Fate” {The Fates — or Moirai — are a group of three goddesses (Clotho, Lachesis,

and Atropos) who weave the individual destinies of mortals at birth. The term Moira can be

understood more generally as fate as such. For the Greeks, even the gods are at times depicted as

subject to fate or as its agents.}

9
Oedipus] Sd: Oedipus, [the all too early death of Achilles] {Upon Oedipus’s birth, his parents

received a prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother. After strenuous attempts

to avoid the prophecy, he eventually and inadvertently fulfills it. The arch of Oedipus’s tragedy

and its aftermath for his family are traced in three “Theban plays” by Sophocles: the Oedipus

Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. Among all the protagonists in ancient Greek

drama, Oedipus is perhaps most strongly associated with the idea of a tragic fate.}
10
house of Atreides] {The curse on the House of Atreus, or on the Atreides, perhaps extends

back to Tantalus, who had abused the privilege he had been granted of dining with the gods. The

gods then punished not only Tantalus but his descendants as well. One of Tantalus’s grandsons,

Atreus, fed the other, Thyestes, the flesh of his sons for the latter’s indiscretion with the former’s

wife. And the last chapter of this accursed family’s saga is traced in Aeschylus’s trilogy, the

Oresteia (Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers, and the Eumenides). The first play presents the

murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, remaining son of Thyestes. The

177
second follows Orestes as he takes his fatal revenge upon the murderous pair. The third charts

Orestes’ torments at the hands of the savage Furies, in charge of punishing all blood crimes, and

his eventual exoneration in a court of law established by Athena in Athens to replace the

impassioned vengeance of lex talionis (“law of retaliation”) with an ostensibly objective,

transparent, and evidentiary process of establishing guilt and handing down punishment.}
11
matricide] Fe1: matricide, those Gorgons and Medusae
12
Etruscans] {The Etruscans were a likely indigenous people, whose civilization thrived in the

territory of what is now northern and western central Italy from c. 10th century BCE through the

Roman-Etruscan wars from c. 8th to the 3rd centuries BCE, up until the eventual assimilation of

the Etruscans into Roman society, a process finalized with the complete incorporation of

Etruscan territories into the newly formed Roman Empire in 27 BCE.}

13
continually . . . anew] Omitted in Fe1.
14
so . . . desiring] Fe1: infinitely sensitive
15
Achilles] {This greatest of all the Greek warriors who fought in the Trojan War was the son of

Peleus, the king of Phthia, and the sea nymph Thetis. It was his mother who dipped Achilles in

the river Styx, holding him by his heal and making him impervious to injury everywhere but

there. In Homer’s Iliad, it is the return of Achilles to the battlefield after the death of his beloved

Patroclus that turns the tide in favor of the Greeks and he is ultimately killed in battle by Paris. In

Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus summons the shade of Achilles, who laments, “I would rather

follow the plow as thrall to another man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on,

than be a king over all the perished dead” (See Homer, Odyssey, Volume 1, trans. A. T. Murray

and George E. Dimock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 11.489–91}
16
this existence] Sd: the continuation of existence

178
17
naïve] {Schiller’s famed essay “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” presents naïve poetry as

unassuming, guileless, direct poetry, whereas sentimental poetry is viewed as self-reflexive and

constructed; the former is seen as natural, the latter as artificial. Schiller writes, “For naïveté it is

necessary that nature be victorious over art . . . Naïveté is a childlikeness, where it is no longer

expected” (183–84). See “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, in

Friedrich Schiller, Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York:

Continuum, 2005), 179–200.}

18
Émile] {In Rousseau’s 1762 treatise, Émile, or On Education, the main character undergoes an

education through experience, as advocated by Rousseau, in order to reinforce the virtues of the

natural human.}
19
which] Fe1: as which
20
But] Fe1: Alas,

Section 4
1
Cf. CW 10, 9[5].
2
precisely the opposite] Sd from: perhaps indeed a different
3
to hold] Sd: to hold, [as the alert condition that it is]
4
disempowering of semblance to semblance] Depotenziren des Scheins zum Schein {With this

perplexing turn of phrase, according to which Schein or “semblance” is said to be reduced or

disempowered to itself, Nietzsche may be playing on the double valence of the term, according

to which it can indicate both a genuine “appearing” of something and a “mere appearance” or

“illusion.” We have opted to leave the perplexity of the German intact, rather than imposing an

interpretation on it. See the Translators’ Afterword for a discussion of this ambivalence.}

179
5
Transfiguration] {The Transfiguration was Raphael’s last painting, which he worked on it until

his death in 1520 (see fig. X).}

6
sublime] Fe1, Pm2: the most sublime
7
thereof] Omitted in Fe1, Pm2.
8
self-knowledge] Selbsterkenntniss; Fe1, Pm2: self-awareness (Selbstkenntniss)
9
Due to . . . humanity] Fe1; Pm2: His titanic . . . was the reason
10
he himself] Pm1 from: the Dionysian
11
the Apollonian!] Pm1: the Dionysian!
12
tones of his harp] Fe1, Pm2: tone of his harp
13
So it was . . . annihilated] Sd: I have thereby indicated how the first consequence of the birth

of the Dionysian, whenever it penetrated, was the annihilation of the Apollonian

14
essence of the Dionysian] Fe1: Dionysianism (Dionysusthum)
15
ever new] Omitted in Fe1, Pm2.
16
drive for beauty] Fe1, Pm2: drive for beauty,
17
“bronze” age] {In Greece, the Bronze Age — usually characterized by the emergence in a

given culture of metal-working, proto-writing, and certain aspects of urbanization — is

commonly understood to extend from c. 3000 BCE to c. 1000 BCE. In the Greek world, this saw

the emergence and decline of the Cycladic, Minoan, and Mycenaean civilizations. The Bronze

Age draws to a close as the Greek Iron Age or “Dark Ages” open (c. 1100–800 BCE), referred to

as such due to a dearth of archeological evidence. This is then followed by the Archaic Period (c.

800–479 BCE), the time period in which the Homeric epics are thought to have taken their final

form, and the Classical Period (c. 479–323 BCE).}

180
18
stages of art] Fe1: periods of art {Nietzsche may have in mind the following periods: 1) the

primordially Titanic, governed by a Dionysian, chaotic natural drive, 2) the original Apollonian,

expressed in the Olympian pantheon and Homeric epic, 3) the re-emergence of the Dionysian in

religious cults and dithyramb, and 4) the Doric, as an Apollonian response. See Schmidt, 152.}

Section 5
1
Cf. CW 10, [9]7.
2
provisionally] Fe1: first
3
new seed] Fe1, Pm2: bursting point of life
4
developed] Fe1, Pm2: rose
5
Oracle of Delphi] {Inscriptions in the Archilocheion, a sanctuary dedicated to Archilochus on

his home-island of Paros, indicate that the Parians had initially resisted the building of the

sanctuary, finding Archilochus’s songs to be “too iambic” (and perhaps too phallic), only to be

punished by the gods. Apollo then counseled them through his oracle to allow the sanctuary to be

built. Eusebius quotes the 2nd century CE cynic, Oenomaus of Gadara, as he lists a number of

Delphic Oracular pronouncements, writing: “Come, let us add to these oracles those in which

Apollo again shows his admiration for Archilochus” (Eusebius, Evangelical Preparation 5.32.2–

33.9). See Douglas E. Gerber, ed. and trans., Greek Iambic Poetry: From the Seventh to the Fifth

Centuries BC (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). There are multiple sources,

including Plutarch and Galen, reporting that the man who killed Archilochus, a Naxian soldier named

Callondas (sometimes Corax), was denied entry to the Delphic Oracle because he had killed “a man

sacred to the Muses.” Plutarch, “On the Delays of Divine Vengeance,” in Plutarch, Moralia VII, ed.

and trans. Phillip H. de Lacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 17.560e}

181
6
actus] Latin: “action, deed, performance”
7
a] Pd: — which would have seemed more compellingly correct to him — a
8
Cf. Schiller to Goethe, March 18, 1796. {Cf. Correspondence Between Schiller and Goethe

from 1794 to 1805, vol. 1: 1794–1797, trans. L. Dora Schmitz (London: George Bell and Sons,

1877), 154, translation modified.}

9
if this . . . the same] Fe1: which we have named both a repetition of the world and a second

outpouring of the same

10
Note on daughters of Lycambes.
11
in the Bacchae] line 668–677 {Euripides, Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, Rhesus, ed. and trans.

David Kovacs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).}

12
honor,] Fe1: honor
13
in the goal] Fe1, Pm2, Fe2; Welt I, Le: in goals
14
It is the subject. . . in this way”] {World I, 276–77, translation modified.}
15
actor] Fe1, Pm2: acteur
16
Thus is our . . . and spectator] Pd: In this sense, all our enjoyment and knowledge of art does

not amount to very much because that being, which as sole creator and spectator prepares for

itself an eternal enjoyment in every art-comedy, is not one and identical with us. Or so we would

have to think, if the existence of the genius did not teach us at the same time that that primordial-

essence presents itself to us once again as artistically creating and enjoying: such that we are

now, in wondrous ways, that uncanny fairy tale figure who can turn round its eyes and look at

itself. Thus are we in art’s every moment subject and object together, at the same time poet,

acteur, and spectator alike

182
17
spectator] Sd: spectator. Without gleaning any intuitive insight into this primordial

phenomenon of the artist, the “aesthetician” is just an overblown gossip monger

Section 6
1
Concerning . . . discovered] Fe1: Of Archilochus, Greek history tells us
2
Concerning Archilochus . . . into literature] {See the discussion of Archilochus in Rudolph

Westphal, Geschichte der alten und mittelalterlichen Musik (History of ancient and medieval

music) (Breslau: F.E.C. Leuckart, 1865), 115–17, NL. Westphal writes, “Archilochus alone is the

master who brought these elements of the folk song to full recognition and validity in art and, in

so doing, asserted a completely new principle against the earlier caretakers of art” (116–17).}
3
in . . . Greeks] Omitted in Fe1.
4
perpetuum vestigium] “perpetual vestige”
5
Magic Horn] {Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Liede (“The boy’s magic horn: Old

German songs”), was an influential 1805 collection of German folk songs and poems, beloved by

the Romantics, edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano.}

6
main currents] Sd from: main directions, a musical and an unmusical
7
between Homer and Pindar] Fe1: in the meantime (between Homer and Pindar)
8
“scene . . . country folk”] {Nietzsche lists here the titles of the second and third movements of

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 (1808), known as the Pastoral Symphony.}
9
For . . . yearning] Pd from: For the lyric poet needs all the stirrings and voices of passion, in

order to depict music’s appearance: not merely to speak of himself as the eternally willing one,

he even includes in nature the striking waves of desiring and yearning: which is to be

183
understood, according to our earlier discussion, just as when the whole of existence, the world’s

infinity appears to us as a continual willing and becoming

10
significance] Fe1: core

Section 7
1
Cf. CW 10, 9[9].
2
We . . . in order] Pm1 from: With this representation of the tragic chorus, we must attempt
3
represent] Fe1, Pm2: signify
4
the stage] {For “ideal spectator,” see lecture five of A. W. Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on

Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, rev. A. J. W. Morrison (London: Henry G. Bohn,

1861), 70. For “the people set against the princely,” see G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on

Fine Art, vol. 2, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 1211: “Just as the

Greek theatre itself has its external terrain, its scene, and its surroundings, so the chorus, the

people, is as it were the scene of the spirit; it may be compared, in architecture, with a temple

surrounding the image of the gods, for here it is an environment for the heroes in the action.”}
5
for . . . thoughts] Sd from: liberalistic-sublime thoughts
6
Aristotle] {See Aristotle, Problems: “the (actors) on the stage [. . .] are imitators of heroes; but

in the old days the (chorus) leaders alone were heroes, while the people, of whom the chorus

consists, were humans. And this is why a mournful and quiet character and melody are

appropriate to it; for (the chorus) is human. [. . .] the chorus is an inactive attendant, since it

merely offers goodwill to those who are present (on the stage).” Problems, Volume I: Books 1–

19, ed. and trans. Robert Mayhew (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 19.48 (p.

577, 579), 922b16–28. Cf. Schmidt 172–73.}

184
7
in general] Fe1: in short
8
in praxi] “in practice”
9
Oceanides] {The Oceanides, daughters of Ocean and Tethys, are nymphs who make up the

chorus in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound.}

10
sigh] Pm1, Fe1, Pm2, Le: sighed
11
protect] In Pd, Pm1, Fe1, Pm2, Le; in Fe2: prove
12
An infinitely . . . freedom.] {Cf. Friedrich von Schiller, “On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy,”

in The Bride of Messina, William Tell, Demetrius, ed. and trans. Charles E. Passage (New York:

Frederick Ungar, 1967), 3–12.}

13
is] Fe1: would be
14
choreut] {Nietzsche uses the term “Choreuten,” which is related to the Greek for “choral

dancer, member of a chorus,” “choreutês,” from the verb “choreuein,” “to dance.”}
15
by daylight] {“Let anyone experience for himself how the whole modern world of

Appearance, which hems him in on every side to his despair, melts suddenly to naught if he but

hears the first few bars of one of those godlike symphonies. [. . .] And, taken in the most earnest

sense, it is this effect that Music has on our whole modern civilization; she effaces it, as the light

of day the lamplight. —” SSD 9: 120. English translation: Richard Wagner, “Beethoven,” trans.

William Ashton Ellis, in Actors and Singers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 120–

21.}
16
Along with] Pd: If we attempt here to bring into harmony with the above presented artistic

principles Schiller’s claim, that Greek tragedy uncoiled itself out of the chorus not merely

chronologically, but poetically and in its ownmost spirit: we must first lay down two

propositions. The dramatic itself, insofar as it is the mimetic, has to do neither with the tragic nor

185
with the comedic. It is out of the Dionysian chorus that the tragic and the comic developed, i.e.,

two characteristic ways of contemplating the world, which contain within átheñ conceptual

consequence of those initially unutterable and inexpressible Dionysian experiences. Along with
17
Hans the dreamer] {Shakespeare, Hamlet, II.ii.561–66: “Yet I, / A dull and muddy-mettled

rascal, peak / Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, / And can say nothing — no, not for

a king, / Upon whose property and most dear life / A damn’d defeat was made. Am I a coward?”

Schmidt notes that the A. W. Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck translation of Shakespeare has “Hans

der Träumer” for “John-a-dreams.” Cf. Schmidt, 183–84.}

18
previously . . . themselves] Pd: described conditions exhausted themselves. Only as servant of

Dionysus can the human who has seen the wisdom of Silenus — bear his existence

Section 8
1
Unfinished notes for the first paragraph in Pd: We have to grasp the Dionysian human as the

authentic creator of the satyr chorus, who his own — — — How the sublime and simultaneously

comical world of the satyr arises out of the soul of the Dionysian human — — — Faced with the

satyr chorus, wise Silenus calls out to the frightened artists of “naturalism”: here you have the

human, the primordial image of the human. You are seeing yourselves! You knit your brow?

You mendacious brute! We recognize you nevertheless, we know just what you are, ashamed

shadowy images of satyrs, embarrassed and degenerate offspring, who betray their fathers. For

here they stand, your valiant fathers, your hairy and betailed ancestors! We are the truth and you

are the lie. — — —

What is the meaning of the idyllic shepherd, as opposed to these human satyrs? He explains for

us the emergence of opera just as the human satyr explains the birth of tragedy.

186
2
Nature, upon . . . ape.] {Schmidt, 186, suggests that this is an allusion to Darwin’s theory of

evolution, which N knew of no later than 1868 from his reading of Friedrich Albert Lange’s

Geschichte des Materialismus (1866, History of Materialism). On 16 February 1868, he wrote to

Carl von Gersdorff: “about the materialistic movement of our day, about the natural sciences

with their Darwinian theories [. . .] I cannot recommend anything better to you than The History

of Materialism by Friedr. Alb. Lange (Iserlohn 1866), a book that gives infinitely more than its

title promises and that one can look at and read again and again as a real treasure.” (KGB II:1,

257).}
3
cultural lie . . . satyr] Pd: cultural lie passing itself off as the sole reality is set free from the

soul of the Dionysian human just as much in the liberating expression of laughter just as it is in

the shudder of the sublime. He wants truth and with it he wants nature at full force, as art: while

the educated human wants naturalism, i.e., a counterfeit sum of educated illusions that count for

him as nature
4
in their theaters] {See diagram of Greek theater, fig. X.}
5
with . . . arcs] Fe1: given the amphitheater’s construction
6
a phenomenon that] Fe1: as that phenomenon
7
just as . . . chorus] Pd: in which they see themselves before themselves
8
and peers . . . being] Pd: , with whose innermost essence he is [intuitively] one through

intuition
9
like an epidemic] Fe1: endemically
10
while] Pd: no one would concede, that this is a congregation of individual singers, for
11
who view . . . transformed] Pd: which views itself and one another as transformed. The

phenomenon of the lyric poet divides itself thereby into two forms: the lyric poet who sees

187
images before him and the lyric poet who sees himself as image: i.e., the Apollonian and the

Dionysian lyric poet.

12
becoming one . . . is] Pd: bursting open in primordial pain. Dialogue is consequently and in

general
13
goat-like] Fe1: goat-legged
14
the god] Pd: the copy of primordial pain and primordial contradiction
15
satyr] Pd: satyr and Silenus
16
person] Pd: Person, in short — Archilochus as human and genius at once
17
First version in Pd {of the preceding two paragraphs}: Only from that standpoint of an

imagining chorus, enchanting itself in a Dionysian fashion, is this scene, and the action that takes

place in it, explained. This chorus can be called the ideal spectator in a true sense, insofar as it is

the only viewer, the viewer of the vision-world on the stage: though with this explanation we

have distanced ourselves completely from Schlegel’s interpretation. It is the genuine producer of

that world. Perhaps it would be sufficient to define the chorus thus: as the Dionysian horde of

spectators, who have passed into a strange way of being and strange character: and who now

from out of this strange way of being produce a living image of the god; such that the process of

the actors is — — — We experience the emergence of tragedy once again out of music.
18
Admetus] {In Euripides’ play, Alcestis, the character Admetus learns that he is fated to die and

desperately searches for someone to die in his place. His wife, Alcestis, ultimately agrees to do

so. After her death, Heracles returns her from the underworld to Admetus, who had previously

shown Heracles exemplary hospitality. On returning, she first appears to Admetus as a veiled

figure.}

188
19
“an eternal . . . life”] {Nietzsche here references lines from Goethe’s Faust, “as unending sea,

as constant change, as life’s incandescence.” See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One,

Scene 1, lines 505–507, ed. and trans. Stuart Atkins, Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 2 (Boston:

Suhrkamp, 1984), 16.}

Section 9
1
Greek cheerfulness] {See “Translators’ Afterword.”}

2
also a religious thinker] Sd: a philosopher
3
Oedipus at Colonus] {This is the second of Sophocles’ Theban plays, according to internal

chronology, between Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone.}

4
the] Fe1: the sad
5
Persian] {Schmidt cites Catullus, Poem 90: “From the unholy commerce of Gellius and his

mother let a wizard be born, and learn the Persian art of soothsaying; for a wizard must be the

offspring of mother and son, if the unnatural religion of the Persians is true, so that with

acceptable incantations he may offer pleasing worship to the gods, whilst melting the fat caul in

the altar flame.” The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus, trans. F. W. Cornish in Catullus,

Tibullus, and Pervigilium Veneris, ed. G. P. Gould, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1988), 165. See Schmidt, 199.}

6
Memnon column] {Nietzsche refers here to one of the colossi of Memnon, 60-foot-tall statues

of the seated Pharaoh Amenhotep III (ruled 1388–51 BCE) in the mortuary compound near

Luxor, Egypt. An earthquake in 27 BCE damaged one of the statues, which henceforth began to

emit a tone when the column was touched by the morning sun. The sounding of the statue at

189
dawn drew visitors to witness the event until Septimus Severus had it repaired in 199 CE and the

sound was lost. See Strabo, Geography, 17.46.}

7
— in Sophoclean melodies! . . . image] Sd: an instinctive intimation of which we discover in the

Prometheus, as distinct from that of Homer, in a manner similar to Schiller as the first and until

now the last who has understood the Greek chorus of tragedy. —
8
only allows . . . image] Sd: keeps silent
9
Here I . . . Like me!] Cf. Goethe, “Prometheus,” 51–57 {Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,

“Prometheus (1773),” trans. Michael Hamburger, in Selected Poems, ed. Christopher Middleton,

Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 1 (Boston: Suhrkamp, 1983), 31.}

10
Aryan] {The terms “Aryan” and “Semite” were used in the late eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries in a wide range of disciplines, to designate everything from groups of language

speakers, to ethnic, cultural, and racial groups of peoples. Linguistically, the term “Aryan” began

as a name for a broad family of languages, encompassing the languages of India and Persia, as

well as Greek, Latin, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic. The philologist Friedrich Max Müller

(1823–1900) claims to have introduced the term in linguistics, over other terms like Indo-

Germanic or Indo-European, and to have borrowed it from the Sanskrit, where it means “of a

good family, and is used as a complimentary title” (Müller, “Aryan as a Technical Term,” in

Selected Essays on Language, Mythology and Religion, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green, and

Co., 1881), 206). See, for example, Müller’s 1848 text, “On the Relation of the Bengali to the

Arian and Aboriginal Languages of India,” in Three Linguistic Dissertations Read at the Meeting

of the British Association in Oxford (London: Richard and John E. Taylor, 1848), 319–50.

Müller also uses the term in his Vorlesungen über die Wissenschaft der Sprache (“Lectures on

the science of language”), BB, comparing Aryan and Semitic language families. The term

190
“Aryan” was also utilized by Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82), in his Essai sur l'inégalité des

races humaines (“An essay on the inequality of the human races”) (1855), where it names the

superior “white” race over the “yellow” and “black” races. For Gobineau, all significant cultural

advances, indeed the very founding of civilization, are due to the Aryans. Nietzsche was familiar

with the work of Gobineau, who was a personal acquaintance of Richard Wagner.}
11
Semite] {The term Semite arose from late eighteenth century racial classifications based on the

Biblical account in Genesis of Noah’s three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Their descendants,

the Semitic, Hamitic, and Japhetic peoples, presumably populated the three continents of Asia,

Africa, and Europe respectively. In the mid-nineteenth century, Ernst Renan (1823–92) in his

Histoire Générale et Systèmes Comparés des Langues Sémitiques (“General history and

comparative system of the Semitic languages”) (1855), discussed Semitic languages (Hebrew,

Aramaic, Arabic, and Ethiopic, among others), in ethno-cultural terms. Renan deemed the

Semitic peoples inferior to the Indo-Europeans, but praised what he took to be their main cultural

contribution, monotheism. Nietzsche had works of Renan in his personal library and refers to

him in later publications.}

12
between the two myths . . . sister] {The classical philologist, Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, saw

the Prometheus myth as typically Aryan-Indogermanic in his Griechischen Götterlehre (“Greek

doctrine of the gods”) (1857), BB, as did Adalbert Kuhn in his Die Herabkunft des Feuers und

des Göttertranks. Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Mythologie der Indogermanen (“The descent

of fire and of divine potions: a contribution to the comparative mythology of the

indogermanics”) (1859), BB. While Welcker does mention the myth of the Fall in his treatment

of Protagoras and Pandora (see Götterlehre, 759–60), the contrast drawn here between

Prometheus and the Semitic myth of the fall is largely Nietzsche’s own.}

191
13
palladium] “something affording protection or security” {This term is derived from Athena’s

cognomen “Pallas,” a statue of whom was presumed to protect the city of Troy.}
14
nobly . . . race] Sd: poor human race as punishment
15
one leap] Cf. Goethe, Faust I, lines 3982–85 {Goethe, Faust, Part One, in Goethe’s Collected

Works, vol. 2, 102, translation modified.}

16
Egyptian rigidity and coldness] {The Egyptian painting and sculpture of the Dynastic Period

(beginning c. 3100 BCE) tended to present impassive, static, timeless, ideal human figures and

seemed not to aspire to imitate moving, dynamic, living bodies. While archaic Greek sculpture

(c. 800–480 BCE), in its bodily proportions, postures, and subject matter, was clearly influenced

by Egyptian art, Greek artists soon came to value lifelike bodily movement and natural repose.

On a broader scale, in a note dated to the first weeks of 1871, Nietzsche includes the Egyptian

religion among those able to “petrify a specific cultural stage for long periods,” referring to “the

mummified, millenia-old culture of Egypt” (10[1], KSA 7: 340.19).}

17
circles] Sd: circles of the individáualñ

18
Atlas] {Atlas is the Titan brother of Prometheus and is condemned by Zeus to holding up the

heavens for eternity; see Hesiod, Theogony, 517–20.}

19
divulges . . . so-called world! —] Sd: makes known his paternal descent from Apollo.

“Justification of justice in injustice” — thus could the double nature of the Aeschylean

Prometheus, his Dionysian-Apollonian origin, perhaps be brought into a conceptual formulation.

20
could] Pm1: could — to the astonishment of the logician Euripides
21
This . . . world! —] Goethe, Faust I, line 409 {Goethe, Faust, Part One, in Goethe’s Collected

Works, vol. 2, 14, translation modified.}

192
Section 10
1
thereby untragic] Cf. Schopenhauer, Welt 1, 380/World 1, 348 (fourth book, §58){: “the life of

every individual is in fact always a tragedy; but worked through in detail, it has the character of a

comedy”}; cf. WB 3 {CW 2, 269: “Viewed close up and entirely without emotion, Wagner’s life

— to recall a thought expressed by Schopenhauer — has a great deal that is reminiscent of a

comedy, indeed, of a remarkably grotesque comedy.”}

2
the copy] {According to Platonic metaphysics, as it is traditionally understood, all sensibly

perceived reality is merely the “appearance,” “copy,” or “idol” of a super-sensible “Idea,” which

is understood by the mind and not perceived by the senses. The sensible entity is said to

“participate” in the Idea.}

3
so: the] Sd: so: the idea, which alone has true reality and only comes to appearance in this

mask, is the suffering Dionysus of the mysteries, that hero suffering the agonies of

individáuationñ himself, who at the same time is called the “wild one” and the “wild” god: this
4
and . . . condition] Sd from: which is why Aristopháanicñ comedy may count as more or less

from Dionysus. Tragic masks, rather, bear at the same time something in themselves something

that characterizes them as appearances of Apollo. And thus, the tragic mask would be defined,

according to Platonic terminology, as the joint copy of two ideas: whereby we would reach the

problem of how something appearing could at the same time be the mirror image of two ideas

and why this appearing thing would now be something intermediate between an empirical reality

and an ideal one, i.e., that which alone is real in the Platonic sense. This relationship is

complicated in that the Apollonian is precisely nothing other than the idea of appearance itself.

193
5
Zagreus] {This term refers to an Orphic Dionysus-like figure, the son of Zeus and Persephone

(whereas Dionysus is the son of Zeus and Semele), who dies by being torn apart by the Titans

and is subsequently reborn.}

6
daemon] {In ancient Greek, the term daimôn (etymologically “one who divides or apportions”)

refers to a super-natural and super-human power producing unanticipated effects in human lives.

In Homer, it can be synonymous with theos or “god” (e.g. Iliad ), but with Hesiod comes to be

associated more specifically with non-anthropomorphic “pure spirits” who are “kindly,

delivering from harm, and guardians of moral men” (Hesiod, Works and Days, in Hesiod,

Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica, ed. and trans. by Hugh G. Evelyn-White [Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1936], 121–23). Plato’s Socrates mentions on several occasions

his own daemon, which intervenes at certain moments in his life and directed him in his practical

deliberations (see e.g. Apology 31c–d, 40c, and Republic 6.496b–c).

7
epopts] “initiates into the Greater Eleusian mysteries”
8
art] Fe1: the beautiful and art
9
metempsychosis] Pd: metamorphosis
10
Tartarus] {Tartaros is a name for the deepest region of the underworld, which Hesiod lists as

the third divinity to emerge in his account of the genesis of the gods, after Chaos or “Chasm”

and Gai or “Earth” (Theogony 116–19).}

11
For . . . historical foundation] Pd from: Thus do religions tend to die off, thus does the noblest

form of an artwork from any time period tend to survive as an antiquarian rarity or a precious

metal
12
ancient splendor] {This is apparently an ancient expression, which Schmidt glosses as “to

dress ostentatiously,” referring to an ape that purportedly strutted about in the lion’s pelt of

194
Heracles. Schmidt cites Lucian, “The Dead Come to Life, or The Fisherman” in Lucian, vol. 3,

ed. and trans. A. M. Harmon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1921), 57: “Aye, ‘Heracles

and the monkey,’ as the proverb has it”; Harmon glosses this as “You are no more like these men

than Heracles was like the monkey that wore the lion’s skin.” See Schmidt, 220.}
13
speeches.] Pd: speeches. Poor Euripides!

Section 11
1
Greek] Pm1: [We might be permitted —after these general foundational observations in order

to rest the eye on a certain historical exemplification, to enter here more closely into the death of

Greek tragedy, under the assumption that, if tragedy is actually born from out of that union of the

Dionysian and the Apollonian, the death of tragedy must also be explained in terms of the

dissolution of these primordial forces: whereby the question now arises as to which power was

capable of dissolving these primordial forces fixedly intertwined with one another.] Greek
2
as when Greek . . . dead”] Cf. Plutarch, De defecto oraculorum 17 {Plutarch, “The

Obsolescence of Oracles,” in Moralia, vol. 5, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1936), 419d.}

3
like . . . world] Sd: the marrow-curdling plaintive cry from every breast
4
New Attic Comedy] {Scholars distinguish two periods of Greek comedy: Old Comedy (5th–4th

cent. BCE) and New Comedy (c. 323–260 BCE). Old Comedy, in the hands of a master like

Aristophanes (c. 446–386 BCE), generally aimed at public figures, engaged in quite

sophisticated political satire, and featured a healthy dose of sexual innuendo and bawdy humor,

whereas New Comedy, in the works of playwrights such as Menander (c. 342–290 BCE) and

Philemon (c. 368/60–267/3 BCE), tended to focus on fictional ordinary and stereotypical

195
individuals engaged in a relatively tame comedy of manners. Furthermore, the importance of the

chorus declined significantly in the transition from Old to New Comedy.}

5
understanding] {See Philemon, Fr. 130, in John Maxwell Edmunds, The Fragments of Attic

Comedy: After Meineke, Bergk, and Kock, Vol. III A: New Comedy, Except Menander,

Anonymous Fragments of the Middle and New Comedies (Leiden: Brill, 1961), 72–73.}
6
faithful] Sd: dead
7
stage, the] Scene Sd: stage {Skene}, and Plato must have felt contemptuously, how here one

would recognize the copy of the copy and no longer the idea. The

{In Nietzsche’s 19th century German, the term Scene primarily means “stage” or “theatrical

venue,” in keeping with the Greek term skênê, and is only secondarily synonymous with the

English “scene,” in the sense of a segment of a play. Occasionally (as in the Sd, here) Nietzsche

uses the transliteration Skene.}

8
Hellene] Sd: Hellene — i.e., the typical man of the people, not the great individual —
9
Graeculus] {“Greekling” is a contemptuous Latin term for Greeks. The Graeculus, as educated

and/or crafty servant, became something of a stock character in New Comedy. Juvenal says of

these Greeklings in his Satires that “They have quicksilver wit, shameless presumption, words at

the ready, more gushing than Isaeus. Say what you want him to be. In his own person he has

brought anyone you like: school teacher, rhetorician, geometrician, painter, masseur, prophet,

funambulist, physician, magician — your hungry Greekling [Graeculus esuriens] has every

talent. Tell him to go to heaven and he will.” Juvenal, Satires, in Juvenal and Persius, ed. and

trans. Susanna Morton Braund (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 3.74–78, p.

173.}

196
10
Frogs] Frogs, cf. line 937 ff. {Aristophanes’ Frogs was first performed in Athens in 405 BCE.

In the play, the god Dionysus bemoans the decline of tragic drama and travels to the underworld

to retrieve Euripides, who had just died a year earlier. When Dionysus arrives in Hades, he finds

Aeschylus and Euripides in a dispute over which of them is the greatest tragedian and Dionysus

agrees to judge the case, ultimately deciding in favor of Euripides. See Aristophanes, Frogs,

Assemblywomen, Wealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).}

11
half-human] Fe1: half-god
12
philosophize,] Fe1: philosophize and
13
and conduct . . . cases] Fe1: , conduct court cases etc.
14
that] Fe1: the
15
capricious] Cf. Goethe, Epigrammatisch “Grabschrift,” line 4 {Goethe, “Grabschrift” in

Goethe’s Werke, Vollständige Ausgabe letzter Hand (Stuttgart and Tübingen: J.G. Cotta’schen

Buchhandlung, 1828), 2: 305; the poem entitled “Grabschrift” appears in the section titled

“Epigrammatisch.” English translation: “Epitaph,” in Roman Elegies and Other Poems and

Epigrams, ed. and trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Anvil Press, 1996), 124, translation

modified.}
16
that] Sd: those wretched Venusberg fumes and that {The first act of Wagner’s opera

Tannhäuser (1845) is set in the magical, underground grotto of Venus, goddess of love.

Tannhäuser, a Minnesinger, struggles throughout the opera against the carnal delights of Venus,

seeking to prove the purity of his love for the margrave’s niece, Elisabeth.}
17
would have] Fe1, Pm2: had
18
Pythagoras] Pm1: Empedocles
19
most] am höchsten; Fe1: most (höchst)

197
20
experiences] Fe1: conditions
21
thinker] Sd: critic
22
one . . . tragedy] Sd: us after the preceding observation regarding the Dionysian in drama
23
But . . . him] Sd: Since for him, however, the understanding went above all else and counted

for him as the genuine root of all enjoyment and creativity

Section 12
1
un-Dionysian] Pm1 from: Apollonian
2
To cut . . . light.] Passage emphasized in Pm1
3
Pentheus in the Bacchae] {In Euripides’ Bacchae, Pentheus is the young king of Thebes when

Dionysus arrives demanding that his divinity be recognized. Over the course of the play,

Pentheus initially resists the introduction of Dionysian rituals into the city, after which, in

retribution, Dionysus enchants Pentheus’s mother and sister, causing them to mistake him for a

lion. They ultimately decapitate Pentheus in the course of their revelries and parade his head on a

pike.}
4
would take] Fe1: takes
5
would transform] Fe1: transforms
6
into a dragon] {In Euripides’ Bacchae, Dionysus punishes those he feels have wronged him,

threatening Cadmus that: “you will change your form and become a snake, and your wife, Ares’

daughter Harmonia, whom you married though a mere mortal, will also take on the form of a

serpent. Then at the head of a barbarian army you will drive an oxcart and will sack many cities

with your innumerable host: that is what Zeus’s prophecy says.” See Euripides, Bacchae, in

198
Euripides, Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, Rhesus, ed. and trans. David Kovacs (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2003), 1330–33.}

7
long — only . . . suicide] Pd: long: at the conclusion of it he sacrifices himself, so to speak, in

that he throws himself upon the set spear of the enemy power
8
the realization . . . realized!] Pd: his own tendency: he even lets himself be torn to pieces by it

like Pentheus by the maenads and through his own mangled remains glorifies the omnipotence of

the god. Thus does the poet complete his recantation with the same terrifying energy with which

he had up until then struggled against Dionysus

9
nor . . . Socrates] Pd from: but rather Apollo, more specifically Apollino, the Apollo who in old

age became a child again {Here Nietzsche seems to have in mind the statue also known as the

Medici Apollo discovered in Rome in the late 17th century, which portrays the god as adolescent

(see fig. X).}

10
it. If] Pd: it. If one is able to experience precisely how and whereof a thing perishes, one

almost experiences as well how it emerged. Thus is it also necessary, since hitherto the

discussion concerned the birth of tragedy and of tragic thinking, to draw a comparison with that

other instructive side and to ask how tragedy and tragic thought perished. We will at the same

time be led toward our indicated task, which still requires of us the presentation of the double

nature of the Dionysian-Apollonian in the form of tragedy itself. Namely, if the Dionysian-

Apollonian was that which determined the form in the artwork of tragedy — in a similar way to

how this was just demonstrated of the tragic mask — so must the death of tragedy be explained

by the dissolution of those primordial forces: whereby now the question arises what was the

power that could dissolve these primordial forces from one another. I have already said that this

power was Socratism. If

199
11
un-Dionysian] Pm1: Apollonian
12
“Nausicaä”] {Goethe sketches the contents of his planned, though never completed,

Nausicaa, in his Italian Journey (entry of 8 May 1787): “The main idea was to present Nausicaa

as a lovely maiden with many suitors, who, feeling no affection for any of them, has refused

them all. However, when a remarkable stranger [Ulysses] stirs her heart, she emerges from her

condition and, by prematurely declaring her affection, compromises herself, which makes the

situation wholly tragic.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, ed. Thomas P. Saine and

Jeffrey L. Sammons, trans. Robert R. Heitner (New York: Suhrkamp, 1989), 238.}
13
actions . . . actor] Pd: actions. Only in this way can we approach with understanding the

Goethean Iphigenia, in whom we have to revere the highest dramatic-epic birth {In traditional

Greek myth, Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon, is sacrificed in order to appease the goddess

Artemis and enable the Greek army to set sail for Troy. Most versions present the sacrifice as

having taken place (Aeschylus’s trilogy, the Oresteia, Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis). However,

in Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians, Artemis takes pity on her, substituting a goat as the

sacrificial victim, and she finds herself whisked away to an unviable life of religious servitude as

high priestess of the temple of Artemis in Taurica. Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris (1787), a central

work of Weimar Classicism, is based on Euripides’ play, though Goethe’s telling emphasizes the

inwardness of the characters and their unperturbed, deliberative natures.}

14
the younger . . . ancient times] Fe1: the solemn rhapsode of ancient times to that younger
15
Ion] 535{c} {Plato, Ion, in Statesman, Philebus, Ion, ed. Harold N. Fowler, trans. W. R. M.

Lamb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 535c, translation modified.}
16
realistically imitated] Fe1: real, true to nature
17
un-Dionysian] Pm1: Apollonian

200
18
virtuous] {See Plato, Meno 89c.}
19
canon] {In classical Greek, the word kanôn or “rod” was used to refer to an instrument for

measuring length, and then came to refer to any “rule” or “standard.” It was, for instance, the

title of the Polyclitus’s (5th century BCE) influential manual on proper proportions in sculpture.}
20
the truthfulness . . . his] Fe1: divine truthfulness and
21
deus ex machina] “god from the machine” {A dramatic device for solving seemingly insoluble

problems by miraculous means. Originally, “machine” referred to a crane-like mechanism used

in ancient Greek theater to allow a divinity to appear on stage from above, first used by

Aeschylus in the final play of his Oresteia, the Eumenidies.}

22
as a poet . . . all] In Pm2, Le, SGT; in Pm1, Fe1, Fe2: above all as a poet is
23
“in the beginning . . . created order.”] {This is a summary statement of Anaxagoras’s

cosmogonical theory as articulated in Diels-Kranz fragment 59B12 and elsewhere, in Early

Greek Philosophy: Vol. 6.1, ed. and trans. André Laks and Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2016).}

24
unconsciously] {For this anecdote, see Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters, where it is

reported that, “Aeschylus used to write his tragedies drunk, according to Chamaeleon (fr. 40b

Wehrli = A. test. 117b). Sophocles (test. 52b), at any rate, found fault with him, saying that even if

used the right words, he did so unconsciously.” Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters, Books 1–

3.106e (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1.22b, Loeb p. 121. The claim is repeated at

10.428f–9a. Nietzsche may have encountered this anecdote in A.W. Schlegel, Lectures on

Dramatic Art, lecture 6; see Schmidt 266.}

25
The divine . . . understanding] Cf. Plato, Ion 533e–534d, Meno 99c–d, Phaedrus 244a–245a,

Laws 719c.

201
26
Orpheus] {This the name of the second play of Aeschylus’s lost tetralogy the Lycurgeia, the

Bassarides (another term for maenads, the female followers of Dionysus who are often described

as mad or raving), is based on a myth according to which Orpheus refused to worship Dionysus,

favoring Apollo instead, and for this refusal is punished, torn to pieces by Dionysus’s followers

in a manner that seems to have anticipated the events of Euripides’ Bacchae. For a summary of

the Bassarides, see Aeschylus, Fragments, ed. and trans. Alan H. Sommerstein (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 18–19.}

27
by] Fe1, Pm2: when by
28
Lycurgus] Lykurg; Fe1: Lycurgus (Lykurgos) {King Lycurgus’s driving Dionysus from Thrace

is referenced in Homer’s Iliad: “No, for not even the son of Dryas, mighty Lycurgus, lived long,

he who strove with heavenly gods; he drove down over the sacred mount of Nysa the nurses of

raging Dionysus, and they all together let their wands fall to the ground, struck with an ox-goad

by man-slaying Lycurgus; but Dionysus fled, and plunged beneath the wave of the sea, and

Thetis received him in her bosom, filled with fear, for mighty terror got hold of him at the man’s

shouts. Then at Lycurgus did the gods who live at their ease grow angry, and the son of Cronos

made him blind; and he lived not for long, since he was hated by all the immortal gods. So I

would not wish to fight against the blessed gods.” Homer, Iliad, Volume I: Books 1–12, trans. A.

T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), 6.130–

41.}

Section 13
1
story] Cf. Diogenes Laertius II 5, 2. {Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. 1,

ed. and trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), II. 5. §18.}

202
2
be due to] Fe1: follow from
3
Marathonian fitness in body and soul] {Nietzsche may be associating “Marathonian fitness”

with the Aeschylean age of tragedy, for Aeschylus famously fought in the Battle of Marathon

and, indeed, recorded this and only this fact in the epitaph he wrote for his burial stone. The

Battle of Marathon was arguably the most important single event in ancient Greek history. In the

first Persian attack on mainland Greece in 490 BCE, the crucial military engagement took place

on the coastal plain at the port of Marathon, where a greatly outnumbered Athenian force met the

invading Persian army and routed them. Immediately following the battle, legend has it, the

Athenian troops quickly marched the 40 kilometers back to Athens in the hopes of fending off a

second incursion from the west. The victory at Marathon subsequently functioned as an

undeniable endorsement of the Athenians’ democratic political system, their culture, and indeed

of the fitness, virtue, and courage of the Athenians. One finds perhaps the clearest expression of

the resulting civic pride in Pericles’ Funeral Oration, which references those who died at

Marathon (Peloponnesian War, 2.34.5). The modern footrace referred to as the “marathon,”

measuring 42.2 kilometers and approximating the distance covered by the Athenian soldiers after

their victory, first became a part of the Olympic games when they were held in Athens in 1896

CE.}
4
{In the lecture course, The Pre-Platonic Philosophers (offered four times from 1869–1876 at

the University of Basel), Nietzsche references in his discussion of Socrates a scholium on

Apology 21a from the 9th–10th cent. CE commentator Arethas of Caesarea as the source for the

oracle’s ranked pronouncement. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Vorlesungsaufzeichnungen (WS

1871/72–WS 1874/75), KGW II:4, 356. English translation: The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, ed.

and trans. Greg Whitlock (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 146. The text in the

203
scholia runs, “Sophocles is wise, Euripides is wiser, but wisest of all human beings is Socrates.”

Domenico Cufalo, ed., Scholia Graeca in Platonem, I: Scholia ad Dialogos Tetralogiarum I–VII

Continens (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2007), 17. For further context, see Joseph

Fontenrose, The Delphic Oracle: Its Responses and Operations with a Catalogue of Responses

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 245-46. Fontenrose lists this version of the

proclamation regarding Socrates’ wisdom as a “spurious form.”}

5
“Woe . . . apart!”] Goethe, Faust I, lines 1607–1611.
6
per defectum] “by defect”
7
superfetation] {This term refers to the extremely rare occurrence of a second pregnancy taking

place during a first, the second embryo stemming from a subsequent menstrual cycle.}
8
divine calling] {Plato, Apology 23b.}
9
Plato’s description] Cf. Symposium 223c–d
10
image] Pd: image with gestures that remind us of Saint John in the great passion of Luini.

[MM: Nietzsche had certainly seen the fresco painting by Bernardino Luini in Lugano (spring

1871). Jacob Burckhardt writes in his Cicerone {Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der

Kunstwerke Italiens unter Mitwirkung von mehreren Fachgenossen, ed. Dr. A.

von Zahn. III. Malerei. (Leipzig: F. A. Seemann, 1869), 878. NL.}: “Lastly, in S. Maria degli

Angeli, . . . the colossal fresco picture of the Passion (1529) . . . Though marked by all the

deficiencies of Luini, this picture is . . . worthy of a visit, for the sake only of a single figure —

that of John, who is giving his promise to the dying Christ.” {Jacob Burckhardt, The Cicerone:

An Art Guide to Painting in Italy for the Use of Travellers, ed. A. von Zahn, trans. A.H. Clough

(London: John Murray, 1873), 114 (see fig. X).]

204
Section 14
1
sublime and much vaunted] Cf. Plato, Gorgias 502b. {Plato, Gorgias, in Lysis, Symposium,

Gorgias, ed. and trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925),

translation modified.}
2
Aesopean fable] {See Plato, Phaedo 61b.}
3
which] welcher; Fe1: which (der)
4
“You see . . . image.”] Cf. Gellert, Werke (Behrend), I, 93 {Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, “Die

Biene und die Henne” (“The bees and the hen”) in Werke: Auswahl in zwei Teilen, ed. Fritz

Behrend (Berlin: Deutsches Verlagshaus Bong & Co., 1910), I: 93.}

5
it] Sd: it, and even occasionally cautioning against it
6
excitements] {Plato, Gorgias 502d.}
7
student of Socrates] {Diogenes Laertius includes this anecdote in his life of Plato in Lives of

Eminent Philosophers, Vol. 1, III. §5.}

8
“raving Socrates”] {Nietzsche has in mind is the 3rd century BCE Cynic philosopher

Menippus, whose lost satires mixed prose and verse. Diogenes Laertius reports that Plato

described Diogenes the Cynic (c. 412–323 BCE) as a “Socrates gone mad.” See Diogenes

Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Vol. 2, 6. §54. See Schmidt, 285.}

9 Plato . . . model of the novel] {Nietzsche expands the point in a note from 1869, 1[108]: “The

philosophical drama of Plato belongs neither to tragedy nor to comedy: it lacks the chorus, the

musicality, the religiosity of the theme. It is much more epic and the school of Homer. It is the

ancient novel. Above all, not destined for praxis, but rather for reading: it is a rhapsody. It is

literary-drama” KSA 7: 42.}

205
10
ancilla] “accessory,” “auxiliary” {This is also a term for a female house slave in Ancient

Rome.}
11
position] Sd: position. We will see yet a second example of how violently Socrates acted

against the art of the muses

12
naturalistic] Fe1: true to nature
13
The Apollonian . . . affect] Sd in the margin: The “tendency” as remnant of the Apollonian, of

the affect of the Dionysian.

14
shows itself] Fe1: begins
15
intoxication] Sd: intoxication. [We have Aeschylus, in order to look into the heart of Greek

tragedy: what more can the Aristotelian doctrine about art add to that? A number of dubious

things, which already for far too long have worked frightfully against a profound consideration

of ancient drama: — — — ]
16
Socrates, make music!] Plato, Phaedo 60e.
17
common, popular music] Cf. Plato, Phaedo 61a.
18
proem] “preamble to a text”
19
into verse] {Plato, Phaedo 61a–b.}
20
something . . . that] Sd from: not the daemonic voice that
21
lack of understanding] Nichtsverstehn; Fe1, Pm2: not understanding (Nichtverstehn)
22
Perhaps art . . . science?] Sd: Pentheus being torn to pieces by the maenads must have

presented to the old Euripides a similar dream appearance. He also sacrificed to the offended

divinity: only he did not place Aesopean fables upon the altar, but his Bacchae

Section 15

206
1
Greeks] Sd from: Greeks as from irksome wasps
2
masses] Pm1: people; Sd: humans
3
jealousy . . . self-sufficient] Sd: mischievous envy, the malicious slander, the simmering wrath

they engendered is not enough to negate that laughing, self-sufficient, staring with profound eyes
4
And thus . . . charioteers] Sd: On the contrary, I am so honest as to explain that the Greeks as

charioteers have our culture and every culture in their hands

5
Achilles] Sd: Achilles, and with the beauty of a rainbow
6
also . . . charioteer] Fe1: this charioteer position of Socrates
7
our] Fe1, Pm2: the
8
next] Pm1: last
9
Lynceus-eyes] {Lynceus was a Messinian prince who, as one of the Argonauts, accompanied

Jason on his journeys in search of the Golden Fleece. Lynceus was said to have vision so

powerful that he could even see beneath the surface of the earth. See Apollonius of Rhodes,

Argonautica, ed. and trans. William H. Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009),

lines 151–55. Nietzsche may also be playing on the phrase in German, to be “Lynx-eyed,”

invoking the cat’s keen-sightedness and the reflective quality of its eyes in dim light.)
10
There would . . . goddess] Sd from: Were there only the intuition of the unveiled Isis – – – {In

referring to the nakedness of the goddess of truth, Nietzsche is perhaps playing on the Greek

term for truth, alêtheia, literally an “unconcealing.” On the “unveiled Isis” see Plutarch, “Isis and

Osiris,” the first extant discussion of such a veil: “In Saïs the statue of Athena, whom they

believe to be Isis, bore the inscription: ‘I am all that has been, and is, and shall be, and my robe

{peplon} no mortal has yet uncovered.’” Plutarch, “Isis and Osiris,” in Moralia, vol. 5, trans.

Frank Cole Babbitt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 354c.}

207
11
on his own . . . If] Pd: for himself a new site for his drilling efforts. Now one should consider

how even after two millennia the work has not come one step further and even now everyone

still claims the right to start over. If

12
Cf. {Gotthold Ephraim} Lessing, {“Eine Duplik,” in} Sämtliche Schriften ({eds.} Lachmann-

Munkker) {(Leipzig: G.J. Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung, 1897), vol.} 13, {23–}24. {The

“seeking after truth” that Nietzsche mentions is connected to investigations into the historical

Jesus and “truth” of the Biblical account. In 1777, Lessing published passages from an

unpublished work of the deist Reimarius, Apology or Defense for the Rational Worshippers of

God. Johann Heinrich Reß published a critical response to these and Lessing replied in turn to

him in the text “A Duplicate” (1778) directed against Reß’s views of the resurrection, to which

Nietzsche here refers. In this text, Lessing writes, “Not the truth, in whose possession some

person is, or supposes himself to be, but rather the upright effort which he had applied to get

behind the truth, constitutes the worth of a person. For it is not through the possession of the

truth, but through the seeking after the truth that his forces expand, wherein alone his ever

growing perfection consists.” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Eine Duplik,” in Werke und Briefe in

zwölf Bände, vol. 8: Werke 1774–1778, ed. Arno Schilson (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker

Verlag, 1989), 510.}

13
something] Fe1, Pm1: as something
14
their friend] {Nietzsche appears to be drawing on a passage from the philologist Friedrich

Max Müller, one of the founders of comparative religion, who writes of the Fiji Islanders, in a

review of Charles Hardwick’s Christ and other Masters (1858), published in Müller, Chips from

a German Workshop. Volume 1: Essays on the Science of Religion (London: Longmans, Green,

and Co., 1867), 59: “They immolate themselves; they think it right to destroy their best friends,

208
to free them from the miseries of this life; they actually consider it a duty, and perhaps a painful

duty, that the son should strangle his parents, if requested to do so.” Nietzsche would have read

this in Müller, “Christus und andere Meister,” trans. Hermann Brunnhofer, in Essays, vol. 1:

Beiträge zur vergleichenden Religionswissenschaft (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1869), 57–58.

Nietzsche enters a slight paraphrase of this passage in a notebook from 1870–71; see CW 10,

5[50].}
15
sophrosynê] {The Greek term “sôphrosunê” is often translated as “temperance” or “prudence,”

and it numbers as one of the four cardinal virtues for the Greeks, along with wisdom, justice, and

courage.}
16
maieutic] {The term “maieutic” stems from the Greek verb “maiesthai,” meaning to practice

midwifery. In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates describes his style of questioning and refuting his

interlocutors as a process akin to the midwife’s, not imposing ideas on others but helping them to

give birth to their own. See Plato, Theaetetus, in Plato, Theaetetus, Sophist, trans. Harold North

Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928) 149a–51d.}

17
If we . . . Socrates?] Pd from: If we look with strengthened and invigorated eyes at the world

flowing around us — then we catch sight of the battle inaugurated by Socrates between

Apollonian science and Dionysian mysticism. What artwork is it in which they are reconciled?

Who is the “music-making Socrates,” who brings this process to an end?

18
the net . . . “the present”] Pd: a festival of reconciliation for the warring parties be celebrated

in a new world of art, in a manner similar to the way those two drives were reconciled in Attic

tragedy? Or will that restless barbaric drive and vortex that now calls itself “the present,”

mercilessly crush “tragic knowledge” and “mysticism” alike

209
19
finely . . . “the present”? —] Other version of Pd: finely? [Here I can only point out how that

idyllic art reaches its pinnacle in the purely conceived ideal of opera] or is it determined to be

ruthlessly torn apart by nonsense in the end under that Socratic thirst for knowledge — Plato

may console us, whose Socrates in the Symposium is the pure artist, such that now indeed not —

——
20
fray!] Pd: fray! [And thus, clad in the armor of the Greeks, we also leap onto the battlefield

and who would like to doubt with what signs — — — ]

Section 16
1
Representation] {World 1, 290}
2
Upon . . . beauty:] Pd: CW 10, 14[3] {The notebook entry reads: “From the fullness of this

insight, upon which, in corroboration of its eternal truth, Richard Wagner has impressed his

stamp in ‘Beethoven,’ I emphasize a passage that is of the highest value for explaining the origin

of tragedy. Music, Schopenhauer says, lets every painting, yes, every scene of real life and of the

world, instantly come forth in a higher significance: all the more, granted, the more analogous its

melody is to the inner spirit of the given appearance. Let us think now of the most

sublime intensification of music, a means would thereby be gained to transform every image of

the world into a myth, to put it briefly, and to bring to expression an eternally-valid universal

truth. In world history we see this monstrous ability of music twice lead to mythic creation: and

the one time we were fortunate enough to experience this astonishing process ourselves, so as

from here to elucidate for ourselves even that first time analogically. Whoever, assuming he has

experienced even once something of this truly religious effect of myth-producing music, will —

210
— —.” The lines “every painting . . . given appearance” in the above are cited from

Schopenhauer, World 1, 290.}

3
gloat over] Sd: nourish itself on
4
externalities.] Sd: in the best case on beautiful hopes.
5
externalities.] externalities. This is found on a loose sheet of paper and reads: [Remark.] In

particular, I now [allowed] permitted myself to take a few steps without the usual torchbearer,

Aristotle, accompanying me [for the] into the cave of Greek poetics. But this dragging him in

again and again for advice on the deeper problems of Greek poetics ultimately has to stop: for it

can instead merely be a matter of gathering from experience, from nature, the eternal and simple

laws of artistic creation, valid even for the Greeks: which as such are better and more fruitfully

studied from any artist, embodied and whole, than from that night-owl of Minerva, Aristotle,

who himself is already estranged from the greatest of artistic instincts, [the ones] which his

teacher Plato still possessed, at least in his mature phase, who also lived too far from the lush

periods of emergence of the primordial poetic forms to detect anything of that age’s pressing

developmental desire. In the meantime, the almost scholarly imitation artist had already

developed, in whom the primordial artistic phenomenon is no longer purely to be observed. What

would Democritus, who lived in a more favorable time, with a majestic Aristotelian pleasure in

observation and sobriety, have been able to report to us about such phenomena of the poetic,

mantic and mystic!

6
Representation] {World 1, 289–91}
7
to] Frauenstädt, Le; Fe1, Pm2, Fe2: also
8
universalia post rem . . . universalia ante rem . . . universalia in re] “universals after the

thing . . . universals prior to the thing . . . universals in the thing” {During the Middle Ages, these

211
Latin terms featured in the debates among theologians concerning the “problem of universals,” a

set of metaphysical, epistemological, and logical issues relating to the universal cognition of

particular things.}
9
music] Frauenstädt, Le; Pm1, Fe1, Pm2: melody

Section 17
1
could have] Fe1, Pm1: must have
2
children] Cf. Plato, Timaeus 22b.
3
even . . . destroyed] Sd from: here even the musical children of tragic art, to which they gave

birth in order to be reborn once again

4
What . . . art?] Sd from: In German music this spirit comes [?] from out of its mystical depths

once again into an artistic birth. In German philosophy this same spirit finds conceptual self-

recognition.
5
New Attic Dithyramb] {Herodotus (Histories, i.23) tells us that the dithyramb was invented by

Arion of Lesbos, perhaps in the latter half of the 7th century BCE, likely as a formalization of

songs already being ritually performed in the worship of Dionysus. The “New Attic Dithyramb,”

of which Nietzsche is so critical here, may refer to the institutionalization of the genre for the

City Dionysia observed every spring in Athens, instituted perhaps by the tyrant Peisistratus

toward the end of the 6th century. Choruses of fifty men and boys representing each of the ten

demes of Athens (drunkenly) performed original dithyrambs recounting events from the life of

Dionysus or celebrating wine and fertility in general. Aristophanes comments on the decline in

the quality of poetic work in fifth-century Athens in his Frogs (lines 1–103), performed in 405

BCE, and in the lost Gerytades, performed three years earlier.}

212
6
individual . . . into] Fe1, Pm2: appearance is enriched and expanded into an individual
7
thief] Raübers; Fe1, Pm2: thief (Diebes)
8
natural veracity] Fe1, Pm2: portrait-like veracity
9
which] Fe1: which as such
10
unproductive] Sd from: slavelike

Section 18
1
Socratic . . . tragic] Sd from: theoretical or artistic or metaphysical
2
Buddhistic] Sd, Pm1, Fe1, Pm2, Fe2; Se in margin (from N’s hand?), Le: Indian (Brahmanic)
3
Faust . . . shore] Sd: Faust and his Alexandráianñ culture devoted to magic and the devil by the

drive for knowledge?

4
Eckermann] On 11 March 1828 {Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den

letzten Jahren seines Lebens, eds. Christoph Michel and Hans Grüters (Berlin: Deutscher

Klassiker Verlag, 2011), 652. English translation: Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of

Goethe, ed. J. K. Moorhead, trans. John Oxenford (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 246,

translation modified.}
5
Socratic] Sd from: Alexandrian
6
earthly happiness] Pm1: happiness of the slave
7
tired] Pm1: broken-winged
8
paralyzed] Pm1: devastated
9
aeternae veritates] “eternal truths”
10
reality] Pm1: causality

213
11
W.a.W.a.R. I, p. 498] Cf. note 26 to BT 1, nnn above. {Schopenhauer, Appendix, “Critique of

the Kantian Philosophy,” World 1, 447.}

12
tragic] Pm1: Buddhistic
13
so as “to live resolutely” . . . full] Cf. Goethe, “Generalbeichte” {“General Confession,” in

Goethe’s Werke, Vollständige Ausgabe letzter Hand (Stuttgart and Tübingen: J.G. Cotta’schen

Buchhandlung, 1828), 1:140}; Carl von Gersdorff to Nietzsche, 8 November 1871, KGB II: 2,

452–53.
14
And shall . . . figure?] Goethe, Faust II, 7438–39 {translation modified}.
15
Socratic] Sd from: Alexandrian
16
Lamiae] Goethe, Faust II, 7697–7810 {The Lamiae are polymorphic vampiric spirits that

attempt to seduce Mephistopheles during the Walpurgis night scene of Faust II.}
17
like Adam . . . name] Cf. Genesis 2: 20.

Section 19
1
Cf. CW 10, 9[5, 29, 9, 10, 109].
2
{Text here follows Fe1 and Pm2, which both omit the comma.}
3
stilo rappresentativo] “representative style” {This is a sixteenth-century Italian musical term

for the half-sung, half-spoken mode of operatic speech that later became known as “recitative.”

The stilo rappresentativo was understood to be the dramatic representation of human speech.}
4
recitative] {Traditional opera provides two modes of vocal expression, the recitative and the

aria. Recitative is a mode of declamatory song-speech used for dialogue or exposition. The aria

is a formal solo song, with or without accompaniment.}

214
5
of Palestrina] Pm1: [of Josquin and] Palestrina {Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525–94),

Italian Renaissance composer of sacred music. Instrumental in the development of counterpoint,

Palestrina is known for smooth flowing compositions of polyphonic harmony. Josquin des Prez

(c. 1450–1521), French composer, considered the first master of Renaissance polyphonic vocal

music.}
6
Florentine circle] {In the late sixteenth century (1570s–1590s), a group of poets and musicians

gathered regularly at the home of the aristocrat Giovanni de’ Bardi (1534–1612) in Florence,

Italy. This Florentine camerata (“society”), as it came to be known, sought to reform

contemporary music in light of their speculative reconstruction of the music of Greek tragedy.

The camerata believed that Ancient Greek tragedy was sung, by both the actors and the chorus,

and that this singing gathered its power through its monophonic style, everyone singing the same

melodic line, similar to what is known as “plainchant” in the incanting of liturgical texts. The

group championed the understandability of the words and argued against counterpoint,

dissonance, and musical exaggeration on that basis. With the discovery of the half-spoken, half-

sung form of the stilo rappresentativo, taken as an approximation of the Ancient Greek manner

of singing, the camerata was able to put its theory into practice in developing the new artform of

opera. Key documents for appreciating the camerata’s reconstruction of Ancient Greek singing

and tonality are found in Claude V. Palisca, ed., The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies

and Translations (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), see in particular Girolamo

Mei’s “Letter [to Vinenzo Galilei] of 8 May, 1572,” 56–77; Giovanni de’ Bardi’s “Discourse

Addressed to Giulio Caccini, Called the Roman, on Ancient Music and Good Singing,” 91–131;

and Bardi’s “Discourse on how Tragedy should be Performed,” 141–51. A competing circle of

artists, led by the aristocrat Jacopo Corsi (1561–1602), also convened in Florence at this time

215
and contributed to the production of what is considered the first opera, Dafne, now lost, by Corsi

and Jacopo Peri in 1598.}

7
conglutination] “to unite by means of a glue-like substance”
8
Orpheus, Amphion] {Orpheus and Amphion were legendary musicians whose playing was said

to have magical power. According to myth, in an ill-fated attempt to retrieve his wife, Eurydice,

Orpheus enchanted Cerberus, the three-headed dog assigned to guard the entrance to Hades.

Amphion was said to have musically constructed the great walls of Thebes. Pausanias refers to

them as “clever magicians,” and reports that “it was through their enchantments that the beasts

came to Orpheus, and the stones came to Amphion for the building of the wall.” Pausanias,

Description of Greece, Volume III, trans. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1933), 6.20.18. See also Horace, Ars Poetica, 5.391–396.}

9
pastorals] Sd: pastorals. Actually we directly find opera likewise in the closest connection with

the pastoral: what we know of that first series of operas — — — The aria is later related to the

recitative: as musical accent to spoken-singing, in the stilo rappresentáativoñ. The opposition is

thus universalized. The singer validates himself in the aria, while he otherwise only appears as a

pathetic declaimer {“Pastoral” is the name for a literary, musical, and/or dramatic genre

idealizing country life and the goodness of nature. Opera could be said to have developed from

early Italian pastoral dramas accompanied by music (along with commedia dell’arte,

intermedios, and various other ad hoc combinations of recitation and musical performance): “in

the late 15th century . . . pastoral poems had been drawn out to large theatrical dimensions and

associated with music. Angelo Poliziano’s Favola d’Orfeo (1471) included various instrumental

episodes and dances; and throughout the 16th century dramatic and musical pastorals became

216
increasingly popular in Italian courts and academies, and strongly influenced early opera.”

(Geoffrey Chew and Owen Jander, “Pastoral,” Grove Music Online, 2001.)}
10
as the regained . . . full voice] Sd: [announced the modern evangel of the artistic human as the

authentically true human] as the regained country of that idyllic or heroically good human, who

at the same time is [would be] an artist in all of his dealings. Who with everything he has to say

sings at least something and at the slightest excitation of feeling immediately begins to sing in

full
11
which] Fe1: as which
12
culture] Sd: culture and in an innocent manner flaunts, so to speak, the pudenda of same
13
body] {See Giovanni Bardi, “On Ancient Music and Good Singing,” 115: “Keeping in mind

that just as the soul is nobler than the body, so the text is nobler than the counterpoint, and just as

the mind should rule the body, so the counterpoint should receive its rule from the text.”}
14
The] Sd from: Even for Greek tragedy the envisioning chorus is the generator of the dramatic

world
15
human] Sd: human. According to the view of this laiety it must be possible to generate

artworks from correct knowledge, from criticism: and whoever knows to comply with the

demand of this laiety, whoever from out of this wish, as it were — — — How opera has

outgrown the basic tenet of Alexandrian culture, thus it shows in its development that that basic

tenet was a lie: such that one could say that the “good human” of Rousseau and our theoráeticalñ

———
16
Schiller’s . . . explanation] “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” {in} Schillers Werke,

Nationalausgabe, 20{.1: Philosophische Schriften, Erster Teil, ed. Venno von Wiese (Weimar:

Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 2001)}, 448–49. {English translation: “On Naïve and

217
Sentimental Poetry,” trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom in Friedrich Schiller, Essays, eds. Walter

Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 2005), 211–12.}

17
from] Fe1: as from
18
actuality,] Sd: actuality: through the middle of the atrocity and earthquakes of the present his

escort led him, like Virgil led Dante through the inferno: until they arrived together at the idyllic

heights of a paradise of humanity, where they were met by such primordial humans as the

tenderhearted singing shepherd or the heroically good champion. The flight to the beginnings, to

nature in the broadest sense, is what exercises the modern human: but this nature is already an

idyllic phantom, which the Alexandrian imagination of these modern humans has unfurled:

enough so that one believed in this phantom as in an actuality and fell passionately in love with

this actuality. What is characteristic of this belief is the representation that the closer we

approach nature, the closer do we also approach an ideally great and good humanity — — —
19
convulsions] Pm1: spells
20
saving . . . semblance] Pm1 from: bathing the subject purely in the cathartic waves of

semblance from the stirrings of the will

21
Omphale] {In some versions of the legend of Heracles, after completing his twelve labors, the

hero inadvertently kills a certain Iphitus and is punished for this by Pythia of the Temple of

Apollo at Delphi, who commands him to serve the Lydian queen Omphale for a year. Sophocles

references this year of bondage in his Trachiniae (lines 69–70). Omphale seems to bear some

etymological relation to omphalos, the Greek word for “naval,” which also referred to the stone

that perhaps sat over the crevice around which the Temple at Delphi was constructed and from

which the Pythia received divine communications from the god Apollo. This spot was

understood to be the center, or naval, of the world.}

218
22
a duplicitous veiling . . . Otto Jahn] Pm1 from: an aesthetic pretext for the impoverished

sensitivity of their sobriety, a duplicitous veiling form for their own roughness {Otto Jahn

(1813–1869) was a philologist, archaeologist, and musicologist at the University of Bonn, while

Nietzsche was a student there. A dispute known as the “philologists war” (Philologenkrieg)

between Jahn and Friedrich Ritschl at Bonn led to Ritschl and Nietzsche’s departure to Leipzig

in 1865 (see Translators’ Afterword). Jahn’s seminal four-volume biography of Mozart was

published in 1856–59 and his Collected Essays on Music in 1866, which included two essays

critical of Wagner as poet, musician, and thinker, “Tannhäuser, an Opera by Richard Wagner”

(1853) and “Lohengrin, an Opera by Richard Wagner” (1854). Nietzsche wrote to Rohde, 8

October 1868: “Recently, I also read (and indeed primum {for the first time}) Jahn’s essays on

music, including the ones about Wagner. A certain enthusiasm is needed to deal fairly with such

a man {Wagner}: while Jahn has an instinctive contrariness and only listens with half-stopped-

up ears. Nevertheless, I grant him many points, in particular that he holds Wagner for the

representative of a modern dilettantism which is permeating and digesting all artistic interests:

but precisely from this standpoint, one cannot be astonished enough at how important every

single artistic disposition is in this man {Wagner}, what irrepressible energy is here paired with

multifaceted artistic talents” (KGB I: 2, 322). Nietzsche ultimately concludes that “the saga of

Tannhäuser and the atmosphere of Lohengrin are a closed world to him” (KGB I: 2, 322). In a

note from 1872 (19 [273]), entitled “Masks of Kotzebue’s Bourgeois Comedies,” Nietzsche casts

his contemporaries in stock roles from the plays of Kotzebue, reiterating his criticism of Jahn:

“The ‘old spinsters,’ the sentimental ones: Riehl, Gervinus, Schwind, Jahn, Freytag talk a lot

about innocence and beauty” (CW 11, 84). For Kotzebue, see ST note 7.}

219
23
double circulation] {In one fragment, Heraclitus writes, “The order (kosmos), the same for all,

created neither by god nor human, but always was, is, and will be, ever-living fire kindled in

measures and extinguished in measures” (Diels-Kranz, 30) and in another, “All things are an

interchange (antamoibê) with fire, and fire for all things, as things for gold and gold for things”

(Diels-Kranz, 90).}
24
Dionysus] Added later in Pm1.
25
leading strings] {This term refers to fabric straps attached to children’s clothing during the

17th and 18th centuries, used to help children walk and remain upright or to keep them from

straying away.}
26
Romance civilization] {Nietzsche refers here to romanische Civilisation, rather than römisch

(“Roman”) or romantisch (“romantic”), seeming to encompass cultures developed from ancient

Rome and peoples speaking Latinate languages, foremost among them the French and Italian.}

Section 20
1
than] Fe1: as
2
worth . . . culture] Fe1: cultural value of the Greeks
3
from out of . . . soil] aus dem griechischen Strombett {Nietzsche’s phrase here is literally “from

out of the Greek riverbed.” The image is one of the Greeks serving as a fertile source for future

creation and growth. What is fertile of the riverbed is its “alluvial” soil.}
4
intention] Fe1, Pm2: tendency
5
superior attitude] Fe1, Pm2: attitude of superiority
6
in everything concerning culture] Fe1: in every cultural respect
7
genius] Pm1 from: spirit

220
8
entire form of culture] Fe1: cultural tendency
9
culture!] Broken off continuation in Pd: culture! Show me a living branching root that is now

still growing out of that culture; then I will believe in a future for this culture. Until then, I see

only a final flickering: or a completely fading generative force. Thus a turning away from the

Greeks, with whom even Schiller and Goethe knew not to enduringly connect us: if they all the

same, the restless wanderers, remained standing at the peak, from where they pointed toward the

new land
10
longing gaze] Fe1: gaze of longing
11
magic-fire] {At the end of the second music drama of the Ring, Die Walküre (The Valkyrie),

Wotan punishes Brünnhilde’s disobedience by putting her to sleep upon a mountain and giving

her as wife to serve the first person who comes across her. Brünnhilde pleads to be given only to

someone courageous and they agree that her resting place will be surrounded by a magic fire.

Wagner’s colorful music in the scene has come to be known as “magic-fire music.”}
12
{Albrecht Dürer’s Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513) is one of three works often referred to

as Dürer’s Meisterstiche or “master engravings,” along with St. Jerome in his Study (1514) and

Melancholia I (1514), all of which are characterized by exceptionally fine technique and

complex iconographic elements. At Wagner’s request, Nietzsche gave him a copy of Dürer’s

print at an 1870 Christmas Day celebration at the Wagners’ home in Tribschen, the same

gathering at which Nietzsche gave Cosima Wagner a copy of “The Origin of Tragic Thought,” a

preparatory essay for The Birth of Tragedy, and Wagner debuted for her the “Siegfried Idyll”

(see fig. X).}

13
it tells] Pm2 from: it dreams

221
Section 21
1
Cf. CW 10, 3[2].
2
exhortative] Pm1 from: orgiastic
3
would] Fe1: might
4
suspect] Fe1: be able to suspect
5
idea] Vorstellung
6
secularization] {Nietzsche’s term here is Verweltlichung, literally a “bringing into world” or a

“worldification,” which we have rendered as “secularization,” understanding this broadly enough

to encompass not just a contrast with the sacred, but with the transcendental and the mythic as

well. “Secularization” is thus a move from the sacred, transcendental, or mythic realm into

worldly existence, one subject to the parameters of space and time. In section 23, Nietzsche will

contrast “secularization” with a countermove of Entweltlichung, or “de-worlding,” whereby

whatever attains eternal existence, i.e., escapes or transcends the boundaries of space and time, is

said to have been “de-worlded” (entweltlicht).}

7
imperium] “empire,” “dominion,” “sovereignty”
8
like . . . Titan] Pm1 from: as the Titan Atlas, so to speak,
9
feeling of freedom] Gefühle der Freiheit Fe1, Pm2: feeling of freedom (Freiheitsgefühle)
10
expiring . . . soul] Pd from: breathing his last amid the convulsive unfurling of all the wings of

the soul? then on the basis of this experience, I would have to alter my opinion of humanity.
11
space] Wagner: realm {N misquotes Wagner, who writes “realm,” cf. Richard Wagner,

Tristan und Isolde, SSD 7: 61.}

12
“wide space . . . world night”] R. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act 3, scene 1 (sung by Tristan)

{SSD 7: 61. Nietzsche’s references in this paragraph are all from the opening scene of Act 3 of

222
Tristan und Isolde, where Isolde with her healing powers is rushing on a ship to Tristan, who lies

dying in his castle in Brittany, attended by the faithful Kurwenal and a shepherd with a pan flute

who keeps watch for her ship.}

13
a] Fe1, Pm2: a peculiar
14
where would . . . contradiction?] Pd from: what unheard of magical force would be capable of

such a miracle
15
“the old . . . wake me”] R. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde (sung by Tristan) {SSD 7: 59.}
16
desolate . . sea] R. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde (sung by the shepherd) {SSD 7: 58}
17
tied us . . . despairing cry] Pd: [continued to hold fast to this existence, the hero now speaks to

us] tied us to this existence, we see and hear the hero, mortally wounded and seized by an

insatiable longing for Isolde

18
Yearning! . . . from yearning!] R. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde (sung by Tristan) {SSD 7: 66}
19
jubilation of the horn] Fe1, Pm2: horn’s jubilation
20
still] Pd: still. To apply the music as a means for a brighter illumination of the inner sense of

vision, as the strongest excitement of the Apollonian drive aiming at forms

21
through] Fe1: as through
22
action] Pd, Pm1, Fe1, Pm2: Vorgang; Fe2, Le: curtain (Vorhang)

Section 22
1
passions] Pd: passions, which he otherwise would only imperfectly have to guess at from

words and gestures alone

2
individuatio] “individuated”
3
action] Pd, Pm1, Fe1, Pm2: Vorgang; Fe2, Le: curtain (Vorhang)

223
4
In the blissful . . . pleasure!] Fe1: In the roiling swell, in the resounding ringing / In the world

breath’s fluttering All — / To drown, to sink — / unconscious — highest pleasure!; MM: final

words of Isolde at the conclusion of Tristan und Isolde, Act 3, scene 3 {SSD 7: 80–81}; in Fe1,

Nietzsche cites from the first draft {Nietzsche’s citation in Fe1 is from the score, Richard

Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Vollständige Partitur (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtle, 1860), 436–

39, the concluding lines of which differ slightly from that of the libretto, published a year earlier,

Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtle, 1859) and reprinted in SSD

7 (1872).}
5
Interrupted attempts at a continuation in Pd: Whoever would now like, after the origin of the

tragic myth has been discovered in this way, to return again to the older aesthetic schematism,

according to which the tragic — — —

In this turn toward home the tragic myth at the same time gives us to understand where it

comes from: why it itself — — —

6
At start in Pd {beginning after the Wagner citation}: From the doubled artistic process in the

aesthetic nature of the audience member and spectator, there would now even be permitted a

portentous glance into the creative process of the tragic artist, who is at once dream- and

intoxication-artist: whereby we, for example, with the greatest determinacy would have to guess

at a monstrous primordial capacity of Shakespeare, even if in his Sonnets he has not so

emphatically instructed — — —
7
such] Fe1: as such
8
catharsis] {In his Poetics, Aristotle’s definition of tragedy includes the claim that it

“accomplishes through pity and fear the catharsis of such emotions.” Aristotle, Poetics, in

Aristotle, Poetics; Longinus, On the Sublime; Demetrius, On Style, ed. and trans. Stephen

224
Halliwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 1449b26–27. Aristotle never

defines the controversial term katharsis, though it can be related to the verb kathairein (“to

cleanse, carry or wash away”) and thus seems to indicate some sort of purification or purgation.

Nietzsche understands the dynamic as a kind of Entladung or “discharge” of the passions, which

he views in terms more therapeutic or physiological than moral. In so doing he would seem to

follow Jacob Bernays’s influential interpretation in Grundzüge der verlorenen Abhandlung des

Aristoteles über Wirkung der Tragödie (1857), BB. See Schmidt, 376–77.}
9
“I could . . . such a work?”] Goethe to Schiller, 19 December, 1797 {corrected date: 9

December, 1797, in Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Der Briefwechsel,

Historische kritische Ausgabe, ed. Norbert Oellers and Georg Kurscheidt (Stuttgart: Reclam,

2009), 526. English translation in: Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, 1794 to 1805,

trans. George H. Calvert (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845), 371, translation modified.}
10
{Georg Gottfried Gervinus wrote a well-respected four-volume study of Shakespeare (1835–

1842), as well as a monograph on Handel and Shakespeare, G.G. Gervinus, Händel und

Shakespeare: Zur Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Leipzig: Engelmann,1868), NL. Echoing Wagner’s

assessment in the “Beethoven” essay, Nietzsche disagreed deeply with both Gervinus’s

understanding of music as a “representation of feelings” (Händel und Shakespeare, 203) and his

insistence that Shakespeare’s dramas adhere to and advocate for practical moral lessons. See

Schmidt pp. 377–78.}

11
quid-pro-quo] “this for that” {Nietzsche here nominalizes the Latin phrase, producing “ein

seltsames Quidproquo.”}
12
enchanted] Fe1: enthralled

225
13
Schiller’s day] Cf. Schiller’s essay “Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet”

(“The stage regarded as a moral institution”) in Kleinere prosaische Schriften, {part four,

(Leipzig: Siegfried Lebrecht Crusius,} 1802{), 3–27.}

14
While] Pd: What now excites, according to contemporary novels, that one can assess: from

whose form and content however again the entire idiocy of the public against the true art with

terrifying determinacy brightened. And while

15
Schopenhauerian . . . porcupines] Schopenhauer, Parerga 2, 689 (§396){/Parerga 2, 584–85.

Schopenhauer’s parable concerns a group of porcupines who huddle together in winter for

warmth, but remain distant enough to avoid each other’s quills. Schopenhauer compares this to

our own need for society and repulsion at individual flaws, deeming the equipoise of forces to be

the space of “courtesy and good manners”; as Schopenhauer concludes, “the need for mutual

warmth is only partially satisfied, but in exchange the prick of the quills is not felt.”}
16
surprise] Pd: surprise. Away from the humans, who are still able to converse about

Shakespeare and Beethoven, I now lead the friend to a high flung place, to a solitary observation,

where he will have only a few companions. You see, I say to him, that — — —

Section 23
1
critical-historical] Pd: Socratic-historical
2
sub specie aeterni] “under the aspect of eternity”
3
myth. Up to . . . all around] Pd: myth: after its end there arises a feverish searching, which in its

most noble formation, as Socratism, grounds science, but which at lowlier registers leads here to

a pandemonium of myths adopted from all over

4
sub specie saeculi] “under the aspect of the secular”

226
5
which] Fe1, Pm2: as which
6
which] Fe1, Pm2: as which
7
point out to him the way] {In Siegfried, the third music-drama of the Ring cycle, Siegfried is

able to understand the language of birds after inadvertently tasting the blood of the dragon,

Fafner. In act 2, scene 3, a woodbird informs him of Brünnhilde sleeping on a rock encircled by

magic fire and guides him to her.}

Section 24
1
animated stone] {As Greek sculpture became less rigid and more “naturalistic” in the works of

such famed sculptors as Phidias, Polycleitus, and Praxiteles, viewers began describing the

material (limestone, bronze, or marble) of the sculptures as empsuchos or “animated,” literally

“ensouled.”}
2
perceived?] Pd; perceived; [which admittedly cannot issue from out of the Apollonian sphere;

for the martyred Laocoön is merely a degeneration of the Apollonian artistic domain, namely

into tragedy — — —]
3
hero? Least] In Pm1, Fe1, Pm2, Le; in Fe2: hero; least
4
pleasure?] Pd: pleasure? [Only if it appears as the artistic game that the world-will plays with

itself: if it gives us an intimation of an eternal justification of existence]

5
music.] Attempts at a continuation in Pd: music: which, in a highly developed form of music, is

the necessary ingredient of almost every musical moment. — one must however attend to the

significance of dissonance in music, in order in it the actually idealistic principle, in a similar

way cause of melody and harmony — — — the actual determination of which the continual

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generation of primordial desire and a simultaneous annihilation of this primordial desire, without

whose magic the melody — — —

6
Heraclitus the Obscure . . . again] {Heraclitus was widely referred to as “the Obscure” among

the ancients due to his paradoxical writing style, and indeed of his thought itself. One of the most

perplexing of the remaining fragments of his writing reads, “The present age is a child at play,

transposing pieces in a game. Sovereignty belongs to the child” (Diels-Kranz 22B52). Nietzsche

seems here to be following a connection suggested by Plutarch, in his essay “On the Epsilon at

Delphi,” associating the Heraclitean fragment with a verse from Homer’s Iliad recounting the

central battle between the Greeks and the Trojans: “Through it the [the Trojans] poured forward /

rank on rank, and before them went Apollo, holding the priceless / aegis. And very easily did he

cast down the wall of the Achaeans, / just as a child scatters the sand by the sea, first making

structures of / sand in his childishness, and then destroying with hands and / feet in his play: so

did you archer Phoebus, destroy the long toil / and labor of the Achaeans, and on themselves

send rout.” Homer, Iliad, Volume II: Books 13-24, trans. A. T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 15.360–64.}

7
then he will . . . thwart his path] {Nietzsche effectively glosses here the main action of

Wagner’s music-drama Siegfried, whose eponymous hero slays the dragon Fafner, kills the

conspiring dwarf who raised him, Mime, and awakens Brünnhilde from her magical slumber.

When Wotan, disguised as a wanderer, tries to prevent him from this, Siegfried breaks Wotan’s

spear with his sword, Nothung.}

Section 25

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1
worst of worlds] {Nietzsche appears to be playing on the notion of the “best of all possible

worlds” as formulated by G. W. Leibniz in his Essays of Theodicy on the Goodness of God, the

Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil (1710), which argues that God chose this world to exist

as the best of all possible ones. The view was popularly satirized by Voltaire in his Candide, or

Optimism (1759) as promoting the passive acceptance of whatever occurs.}

2
would . . . madness] Pd from: with this Hellenic education in beauty would he say to himself:

“What could you not now endure? What degree of dithyrambic madness might you allow

yourself to consecrate here!”

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