Craig White's Literature Courses

Critical Sources


Notes to Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
(1872, 1886)

Chapter 12

Glossary to Birth of Tragedy


Socrates (bust), the Louvre

[Instructor's notes: start with Dionysiac / Apolline (exemplified by tragedies of Aeschylus & Sophocles)

> with Euripides, dialectic becomes Dionysian / Socratic     (Classical Greek Poets & Philosophers)

Dionysian chorus as primitive myth; abandonment to conditions, instinct

 

Review chapter 11:

55 Euripides brought the spectator on stage [contrast Birth of Tragedy pp. 36-38: ideal spectator, chorus as wall, x-precise reality]

58 two spectators as sole judges and masters competent to judge

One = Euripides himself as thinker: richness of critical talent

59 > 2nd spectator who did not understand tragedy and therefore chose to ignore it

 

Chapter 12

59 name for 2nd spectator? >

Contradictory and incommensurable elements of Aeschylean tragedy

Duality of chorus and tragic hero = Apolline & Dionysiac, two interwoven artistic impulses

Duality as very origin and essence of Greek tragedy

intention of Euripides: excision of primitive and powerful Dionysiac, rebuilding of tragedy on non-Dionysian morality and philosophy

 

60 Dionysus bewitches intelligent adversary: e.g., Pentheus in Bacchae

Cadmus and Tiresias (and Euripides): the reasoning of the cleverest individual cannot overthrow ancient popular traditions [Bacchae 263 ff.]

[Euripides’s] tragedy is a protest against the fulfillment of his intentions

Dionysus hounded from stage by a daemonic power that spoke through Euripides [daemon: the Latin spelling daemon is sometimes used to distinguish the figure from later definitions as a spirit of evil. In ancient mythology a demon or daemon was a spirit midway between humanity and the gods.]

Euripides merely a mask: deity that spoke was a new-born daemon named Socrates

New opposition: Dionysiac and Socratic

Conflict > downfall of Greek tragedy

Socratic intention vanquished Aeschylean tragedy

[from glossary: 60 the Socratic intention: Nietzsche argues that Socrates, founder of Western philosophy, believes that intellectual analysis generates and disseminates goodness in the leadership and citizenry, and that . . .

Euripides’s tragedies imitate this process when their protagonists explicate and defend their motivations in a context of rational humanistic comprehension and an everyday world they share with the average citizen.

In contrast, according to Nietzsche, the earlier Greek tragedians (Aeschylus and Sophocles) did not rely on a rationally enlightened world but brought spectators into contact with a deeper, irrational, ecstatic existence embodied in myth and mystery (or, following Dionysus, intoxication or altered mental states).]

61 > a dramatized epic: an Apolline sphere of art in which tragic effects were impossible.

poet does not merge completely with his images; images pass before him (cf. Apolline state as dream, which lacks internality, absorption)

consecration of internal dreaming

actor > rhapsodist (singer of epics),

Power of Apolline epic: entirely illusion and delight and redemption in illusion

Internal dreaming; therefore never entirely an actor

x-illusion and delight in illusion.

Plato's Ion*: "If I say something sad, my eyes fill with tears; but if what I say is frightening and terrible, my hair stands on end with horror and my heart beats."

[*Ion is a singer of epic poetry]

Euripides draws up the plan as a Socratic thinker, puts it into effect as a passionate actor but not a pure artist

Euripidean tragedy . . . has made the greatest possible break with the Dionysiac elements

needs new stimuli, neither Apolline or Dionysiac: cool, paradoxical thoughts

 

62 Euripides achieves fiery emotions rather than Dionysiac ecstasies

Highly realistic counterfeits, inartistic naturalism

Phenomenon of aesthetic Socratism: “to be beautiful everything must first be intelligible.”; cf. "only the one who knows is virtuous"

Insistent critical process, audacious intelligibility

Euripidean prologue: what will happen; therefore no suspense, tension; know what will happen, so why wait? [Example: Aphrodite's prologue in Hippolytus, Dionysus's prologue in Bacchae]

x-epic tension > great rhetorical-lyrical scenes

Pathos rather than plot

A missing link for listener, gap in mesh of preceding story

62-3 spectator, working out meaning, cannot be completely immersed in the sufferings and actions of the protagonist, cannot breathlessly participate in their suffering and fear.

 

63 In these opening scenes Aeschylus and Sophocles employed the subtlest devices to give the spectator, as if by chance, all the threads that he would need for a complete understanding; a feature which preserves the noble artistry that masks the necessary formal element, making it look accidental. [compare Euipides's ineffective exposition in Hippolytos?]

Euripides’s prologue before exposition via deity: cf. notorious deus ex machina

Anaxagoras / Euripides first sober philosopher / poet in a company of drunkards

obliged to condemn his "drunken" peers

Sophocles on Aeschylus: did right thing but unconsciously

 

64 Plato: poets cf. soothsayers & oneiromancers

‘everything must be conscious before it can be beautiful”

Socrates = 2nd spectator who didn’t understand the older tragedy

Socrates = new Orpheus against Dionysus

> a secret cult which was gradually to cover whole world

 Euripides & Socrates

summary: reason separates, distances (Euripides's comparative shallowness, distinctness, modernity of characters)

contrast emotional involvement, group dynamics, instinct (Dionysiac ecstasy, absorption, crowd frenzy)--earlier tragic characters larger than life, not realistic or naturalistic

Great age of Greek Tragedy becomes the Great Age of Greek Philosophy

Classical Greek Poets & Philosophers


Euripides