Abstract
Nietzsche characterized his first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), in the Attempt at a Self-Criticism (1886) that he later added to it, as a Romantic work. This chapter argues that characterization should be taken seriously. For even beyond the features of the book that are clearly uppermost in his mind when he advances it, such as its “artists’ metaphysics” and its sympathy with Christianity, a whole set of further fundamental philosophical ideas in the work also come from German Romanticism, including, for example, Nietzsche’s understanding of it as a synthesis of philosophy, science, and art (a “centaur” as he called it). Moreover, the work’s detailed interpretation of ancient tragedy likewise turns out to be profoundly indebted to German Romanticism, specifically to a deep re-thinking of the nature of genres in general and of ancient tragedy in particular that had already been undertaken by the Pre-Romantic Herder and the leading Romantics Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel.
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Notes
- 1.
See Michael S. Silk and Joseph P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy, esp. their survey of influences on the work in chap. 9, where they do not even include the leading Romantics, the Schlegel brothers, among them.
- 2.
Barbara von Reibnitz, Ein Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsche ‘Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik’ (Kapitel 1–12).
- 3.
That is: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. W. Kaufmann, 25–6 (orthography slightly modified). Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882/1887), trans. W. Kaufmann, 327–31. A bit later, in Ecce Homo (1888), Nietzsche instead says that the work smells of the 1820s and of Hegel (On the Genealogy of Morals, Ecce Homo, trans. W. Kaufmann, 270). However, the seeming discrepancy in his testimony is less dramatic than it might appear, for he commonly thinks of Hegel as a Romantic (see, e.g., The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, secs. 253, 419, and 422). And indeed, such a conception is by no means completely indefensible (for some relevant discussion of Hegel’s relation to the Romantics, see Michael N. Forster, “Friedrich Schlegel and Hegel” and “August Wilhelm Schlegel and Hegel on Art”).
- 4.
Nietzsche wrote: “Science [Wissenschaft], art, and philosophy are now growing together inside me so much that in any case I’ll be giving birth to centaurs one day” (letter from February 15, 1870; quoted at Silk and Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy, 39, translation modified).
- 5.
Nietzsche’s elevation of art in The Birth of Tragedy does not exclude religion and metaphysics, though, but rather incorporates them (in particular, Dionysian religion and the metaphysical thesis of a contradictory, suffering “primal one [Ureine]”; see Nietzsche 1967, 52). (An exclusion of religion and metaphysics is only involved when Nietzsche later endorses a variant of the same position about art/aesthetics in his Attempt at a Self-Criticism of 1886 (see Nietzsche 1967, 22–4), in which case the “aesthetic justification” of existence that he now has in mind will no longer be a religious or metaphysical one but instead, roughly, one in terms of his later ideal of the “higher man.”) Moreover, this conception of an incorporation rather than exclusion of such other domains is yet a further point of continuity with, and debt to, early Romanticism.
- 6.
A modest qualification: Nietzsche famously cites Heraclitus in connection with this conception (Nietzsche 1967, 142), thereby drawing on a rather dubious interpretation of Heraclitus that had recently been developed by the classicist Jacob Bernays (see on this Stephen Halliwell, “Justifying the World as an Aesthetic Phenomenon,” 109–10). Also, the conception has an obvious affinity with Hegel’s notion of Absolute Spirit and its relation to finite Spirit. However, both of these positions—both Bernays’ interpretation of Heraclitus and Hegel’s notion of Absolute Spirit and its relation to finite Spirit—were probably themselves influenced by Friedrich Schlegel. And some sort of more direct influence of Friedrich Schlegel on Nietzsche here also seems likely. (Incidentally, this can be taken as an example of the sort of complicated “trees” question that I am largely bracketing in this chapter.)
- 7.
She supplies specific references to Schlegel’s works on the same page. Cf. Behler, “Die Auffassung des Dionysischen durch die Brüder Schlegel und Friedrich Nietzsche,” for a similar view and for some further textual references.
- 8.
Friedrich Schlegel, Gespräch über die Poesie (KFSA, 2:312, cf. 311–2): “I come immediately to the point. I say that our poetry lacks a center of the sort that mythology was for the poetry of the ancients and that every essential respect in which modern poetry falls short of ancient can be summed up in the words: we have no mythology. But I add that we will soon receive one, or rather that it is time for us to work seriously to help bring one into existence.”
- 9.
Compare on this subject Michael N. Forster, “Historicizing Genre: The German Romantic Rethinking of Ancient Tragedy.”
- 10.
Compare already Of the Ode (1764–1765): the ode “has become a Proteus among the nations” to the point that it is doubtful that there is really a single thing there at all (FHA 1:79; cf. 79–88).
- 11.
This theme is central and omnipresent in the essay Shakespeare.
- 12.
Cf. FHA 2:500–5; FHA 7:791; S 23:346–7.
- 13.
For a more recent development of the last point in relation to Shakespeare, see Lawrence Danson, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres.
- 14.
Thus, already in Of the Ode (1764–1765) he attempts to explain the various different types of ode that have been produced over the course of history in light of their respective cultural contexts (FHA 1:79ff.; cf. FHA 2:507–8), and he insists that their future analyst needs to be someone who is an expert on antiquity and who knows the spirits of the relevant nations (FHA 1:98). Similarly, in the essay Shakespeare he demands that the interpreter of dramatic works should interpret them in light of the author “and his history and his time and his world” (FHA 2:548).
- 15.
Herder already espouses this position in his early Essay toward a History of Lyric Poetry (1764), where he writes in connection with lyric poetry: “But it is not only delightful but also necessary to trace the origin of the objects that one wants to understand with a certain completeness. With that we obviously lose a part of the history, and how much does the history not contribute toward the explanation of the whole? And moreover, the most important part of the history, from which subsequently everything can be derived! For just as the tree from the root, so the progress and blossoming of an art must be capable of being derived from its origin. The origin contains in itself the whole essence of its product, just as the whole plant with all its parts lies wrapped up in the seed; and I will not be able to extract from the later condition the degree of explanation that makes my explanation genetic” (S 32:86–7; emphasis original). Herder also presupposes this position in his historical account of the ode in Of the Ode (1764–1765) and again later in his treatment of tragedy in Shakespeare (1773).
- 16.
Hamlet, act 2, sc. 2, Polonius speaking: “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.”
- 17.
Despite my criticism of it in what follows, Szondi’s account is very informative and eminently worth reading.
- 18.
Aristotle argues in the Poetics that the mythos , or story, of a tragedy should consist in a single, whole praxis, or action (Poetics, 1149b, 1450a).
- 19.
For a more recent version of the same accusation against Aristotle, see Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, 264–5.
- 20.
Schlegel 1957, no. 217; emphasis original. Later he problematizes the doctrine of the unity of action again, but in a somewhat different way: in notes from 1802/1803 he says that the unity involved is ultimately musical (KFSA 15/2:183). Still later he problematizes it yet again, and in yet another way, suggesting in lectures from 1803/1804 that the unity involved in tragedy is the unity of a story rather than of an action (KFSA 11:83).
- 21.
See the remark Friedrich already made in his Charakteristik der griechischen Tragiker (1795) that “The religious … spirit is an essential part of tragedy” (KFSA 11:203). Also and esp. On the Study of Greek Poetry (1795/1797) (Schlegel 2001, 48, 61). Cf. later KFSA 11:71ff.; 15/2:48, 160–2, 183. For a more recent version of the same point against Aristotle, see Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, esp. 146–8, 230–4.
- 22.
Friedrich already makes this point emphatically in his Charakteristik der griechischen Tragiker (1795) (KFSA 11:202–10). It can also be inferred from the first and only published volume of his Geschichte der Poesie der Griechen und Römer, which, as it nears its conclusion and approaches the discussion of tragedy that he planned to undertake in the second volume, turns to a focus on politics and especially on the emergence of freedom and republicanism in the Greek world (Schlegel 1798, 215ff.), and moreover explicitly says that the dithyramb (from which tragedy arose) was an expression of freedom and properly belonged to democracy (ibid., 220).
- 23.
Friedrich already implies this point in parts of his Geschichte der Poesie der Griechen und Römer (Schlegel 1798, esp. 80, 147) (though not indeed consistently; e.g., at ibid., 145–6 he instead says that tragedy was fictional). He subsequently repeats a version of the same point in the Cologne lectures on German language and literature from 1807, where he argues that for the ancient Greeks the mythology and religion that formed the basis of their serious poetry were thoroughly mixed with true history, and that this constitutes a fundamental difference between their genres of serious poetry and our modern counterparts (KFSA 15/2:50–4; cf. 54–8, where he notes that by contrast invention, or fiction, is the very essence of such modern genres as the novel and the fairy tale). He later repeats the point again in his Lectures on the History of Literature (originally delivered in 1812 and published in 1815) (Schlegel 1873, 36).
- 24.
- 25.
See Schlegel 1973, 75–7.
- 26.
See Schlegel 1973, Lectures 17–18. Concerning the doctrine of the three unities of action, time, and place, August Wilhelm points out that Aristotle does not himself really espouse a doctrine of the unity of time, let alone a doctrine of the unity of place (these two doctrines were rather the invention of Renaissance and Early Modern Neo-Aristotelians such as Castelvetro), and moreover that they are often violated by ancient tragedies of considerable stature (e.g., the unity of place by Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Sophocles’ Ajax; both unities by Euripides’ fragmentary Stheneboea). Concerning Aristotle’s doctrine of the unity of action, August Wilhelm, having considered various natural-looking interpretations of this doctrine and rejected each of them on the grounds that it would constitute an aesthetically invalid rule, does eventually come up with an interpretation of it which in his view makes it an aesthetically valid rule (namely, that a tragedy should have a single overall idea). However, he does not seem to think that this is exactly what Aristotle meant by it. For a sophisticated recent treatment of the supposedly Aristotelian doctrine of the three unities which essentially confirms August Wilhelm’s assessment of it, see Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics.
- 27.
Cf. Behler, “Die Auffassung des Dionysischen durch die Brüder Schlegel und Friedrich Nietzsche,” 350–1, which likewise points out that August Wilhelm’s views concerning both the importance and the republican nature of the tragic chorus can be traced back to similar views that were first developed by Friedrich.
- 28.
Indications of this can be found at On the Study of Greek Poetry (1795/1797), 17, 60–3.
- 29.
For example, even in his 1807 lectures on German language and literature, where he does seem to be somewhat skeptical of the theory, since he emphasizes that tragedy encourages strong emotions in the audience but says nothing about its eventual catharsis of them (KFSA, 15/2:89–90), he still refrains from actually contradicting it.
- 30.
For a little further discussion of these disagreements, see Forster, “Historicizing Genre: The German Romantic Rethinking of Ancient Tragedy.”
- 31.
For example, Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics.
- 32.
See, for example, Nothing to Do with Dionysos?, ed. J.J. Winkler and F.I. Zeitlin; The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, ed. P.E. Easterling; J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. Concerning Aristotle’s suppression of the religious dimension of tragedy, see also Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, 146–8.
- 33.
For a little more discussion of it, see Forster, “Historicizing Genre: The German Romantic Rethinking of Ancient Tragedy,” 162. The relevant questions are treated more fully in Forster, “Plato and Aristotle on the Nature of Tragedy” (forthcoming).
- 34.
For a slightly fuller treatment of this subject, see Forster, “Friedrich Schlegel and Hegel” and “August Wilhelm Schlegel and Hegel on Art.”
- 35.
This point actually requires some qualification for both Hegel and Nietzsche. Concerning Hegel, whereas it applies more or less without qualification to the first version of his theory as presented in the Phenomenology, the Aesthetics lectures belatedly try to recuperate some of Aristotle’s doctrines, albeit in strongly modified variants. And something similar arguably happens in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy as well. For reasons of space I shall not develop this qualification here, but I hope to do so in future work.
- 36.
Besides its complete absence from The Birth of Tragedy, see also The Gay Science, 105–6.
- 37.
See also, later, The Gay Science, 134–5 and Twilight of the Idols (1888), trans. W. Kaufmann, 562.
- 38.
Karl Otfried Müller, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur bis auf das Zeitalter Alexanders (originally 1841), 1:23; 2:24–40. A number of the more specific features of Nietzsche’s account in this area come from Müller rather than from his Romantic forerunners, however—for example, Nietzsche’s emphasis on the myth of Dionysos Zagreus and his sufferings (cf. ibid., 1:41, 396–7; 2:24ff.).
- 39.
Incidentally, Nietzsche’s favorite colleague in Basel, Jacob Burckhardt, likewise emphasized this side of ancient tragedy in his lectures on Griechische Kulturgeschichte, which were delivered during the period 1872–86.
- 40.
Jacob Burckhardt championed a similar position in his Griechische Kulturgeschichte.
- 41.
See esp. On the Study of Greek Poetry (1795/1797), On Homeric Poetry (1796), and History of the Poetry of the Greeks and Romans (1798). Concerning Alexandrianism, see also Friedrich’s essays on Greek culture from the earlier 1790s. For the whole account, see in addition his somewhat later lectures on the history of European literature from 1803/1804 (KFSA 11:71–97).
- 42.
See, for example, The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, esp. the article by Paul Cartledge, “‘Deep Plays’: Theatre as Process in Greek Civic Life”; and Nothing to do with Dionysos?, esp. the articles by Simon Goldhill, “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology,” and Jack J. Winkler, “The Ephebes’ Song: Tragôidia and Polis.”
- 43.
KSA III 3 = Nietzsches Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. III 3.
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Forster, M.N. (2020). Romanticism and The Birth of Tragedy. In: Forster, M., Steiner, L. (eds) Romanticism, Philosophy, and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40874-9_12
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