The Tragic Disposition

Abstract

Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy, which had such a bitter taste for those used to more vapid diets of tragic criticism, found its basic ingredients in the Apollinian and Dionysian impulses the philosopher saw so vibrantly displayed in the ancient Greeks. We recall his words in The Birth of Tragedy that through Apollo and Dionysus ‘we come to recognise that in the Greek world there existed a tremendous opposition, in origin and aims, between the Apollinian art of sculpture, and the non-imagistic, Dionysian art of music’ [BT (1) p. 33]. Though usually in open conflict, these impulses do ‘eventually, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic “will”, … appear coupled with each other, and through this coupling ultimately generate an equally Dionysian and Apollinian form of art — Attic tragedy’ [ibid.].

There is but one hope and guarantee for the future of man, and that is that his sense for the tragic may not die out…

— Nietzsche, ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’ (4), Thoughts out of Season (i), Complete Works vol. 4, p. 131.

We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy…

— Yeats, ‘Four Years: 1887–1891’ (xxi), ‘The Trembling of the Veil’, Auto, p. 93/189.