Craig White's Literature Courses Critical Sources Notes to Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872, 1886) Chapter 14 Glossary to Birth of Tragedy

67 Cyclops eye of Socrates never glowed with sweet madness of artistic inspiration

x-gaze with pleasure into abysses of Dionysiac

67 what Plato called the “divine and praiseworthy” art of tragedy: In The Republic (c. 380BCE), Plato acknowledged the power and pleasure of poetry and tragedy but nonetheless banished them from his ideal state because they depend on irrational impulses, teach the wrong lessons, and arouse improper emotions.

Aesopian fable

68 tragedy doesn’t “tell what’s true,” addresses those “without much wit”

tragedy represents only the agreeable, not the useful [Art's purpose to entertain & inform]

the young tragedian, Plato, burnt his writings to become a pupil of Socrates

> force poetry itself into new and unknown channels

Plato's conde;mnation of tragedy and art in general; cf. Socrates's naive cynicism

Plato x-older art as counterfeit of an illusion (cf. mimesis)

Plato striving to go beyond reality and portray the idea at the basis of that pseudo-reality.

Platonic dialogue absorbed all earlier genres within itself; mix of all available styles and forms: somewhere between narrative, lyric poetry, and drama, b/w prose and poetry

strict older law of unified linguistic form

69 Platonic dialogue as lifeboat for escape of shipwrecked older poetry

Plato gave posterity the model for a new art form—the novel.

“an infinitely enhanced Aesopian fable.”

Poetry subordinated to dialectical philosophy

the new channel into which Plato drove poetry, under the pressure of the daemonic Socrates.

Philosophical thought overgrews art and forces it to cling tightly to the bough of the dialectic.

Apolline tendency cocooned within its logical schematism

Translated Dionysiac into naturalistic emotions

Socrates recalls Euripidean hero, defending actions with arguments and counter-arguments

Dionysiac self-destruction—death-leap into bourgeois theatre [its [tragedy’s] death-leap into bourgeois theater:  again, Euripides under the influence of Socrates’s rationalism transforms tragedy from Dionysiac ecstasy to everyday realism in the Apolline realm.]

visible bond between virtue and knowledge, faith and morality

Transcendental justice of Aeschylus becomes “poetic justice” + deus ex machine

How does the chorus look?

70 chorus looks arbitrary (= cause of tragedy and the tragic)

Sophocles reduces chorus to par with actors

first step toward annihilation of chorus

Optimistic dialectic drives music out of tragedy

Dream world of a Dionysiac rapture

Socrates x-merely negative agent of destruction

Profound experience from life of Socrates

necessarily a polar opposition between Socratism and art?

“artistic Socratism” a contradiction in terms?

art for despotic logician a void or lacuna

A dream: “Socrates, make music!”

70-71 philosophy the highest of arts

71 in prison, wrote hymn to Apollo + Aesop in verse

Limitations of logic: “Is that which is unintelligible to me necessarily unintelligent? Might there be a realm of wisdom from which the logician is excluded? Might art even be a necessary correlative and supplement to science?”