The Birth of Tragedy: How Early Nietzsche Connects to Late Nietzsche

The Birth of Tragedy is Nietzsche’s first major attempt at a philosophy. In it contains his Dionysian-Apollinian distinction. These are contrasting elements. The former is chaotic and the latter is orderly:

Apollo represents the aspect of the classical Greek genius extolled by Winckelmann and Goethe: the power to create harmonious and measured beauty; the strength to shape one’s own character no less than works of art; the ‘principle of individuation’ (GT 1); the form giving force, which reached its consummation in Greek sculpture. Dionysus is the symbol of that drunken frenzy which threatens to destroy all forms and codes; the ceaseless striving which apparently defies all limitations; the ultimate abandonment we sometimes sense in music.

This distinction is crucial for not only understanding Greek art and tragedy, but life in general; the former, because Nietzsche believed that the integration of both order and chaos was the reason why the ancient Greeks were able to transcend pessimism -and also produce the profoundest of tragedies- and the latter because life is a perpetual struggle between order and chaos. This distinction is reflected in Nietzsche’s later philosophy, with the endorsement of Dionysus but not the Dionysus of The Birth of Tragedy. It is also integral to understanding Nietzsche’s later works, in the same respect that Apollo is to Dionysus within the work itself. The Birth of Tragedy, from a historical perspective, has “cast a spell on almost everybody who has dealt with the subject [Ancient Greek tragedies] since 1871.” The integration of order and chaos, giving us the full scope of human quintessence is not a new idea but can be profoundly helpful in finding meaning in the world, as is articulated in the Taoist notion of Yin and Yang. Indeed, by Nietzsche’s own words, this is arguably more of a modern problem than it is an ancient one.

Prior to The Birth of Tragedy, the scholarly consensus concerning the ancient Greeks was radically different from what Nietzsche advanced. Greek culture was viewed through an Athenian lens: “noble simplicity, calm grandeur.” Nietzsche asserts that “only a generation that applauded Rousseau’s conception of a paradisiac state of nature could believe that Greek culture was a peaceful and idyllic Eden.” Indeed…