"That wonderful thing is something you can't get at all, which is: don't be born, don't exist, be nothing."
- Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
The Birth of Tragedy is Nietzsche's first book, and Nietzsche was just 26 years old when he wrote it. It is a work that explains Nietzsche's aesthetic views, but it contains the germ of many of Nietzsche's later ideas.
This not-so-thick book is very informative, and the ancient Greek tragedies, myths, and classical German philosophies mentioned in it all need a corresponding background to be better understood, and just a few names that appear in the book are enough to make people head-scratching: Euripides, Aristophanes, Socrates, Plato, Kant, Schlegel, Schiller, Schleigher... Not to mention the cultural and philosophical context.
Nevertheless, The Birth of Tragedy is not difficult to read, and in a nutshell, the content of the book is: the ancient Greek tragedy and the birth and demise of the tragic spirit.
01
The core of "The Birth of Tragedy" is the two basic impulses of the god of the sun and the god of wine from ancient Greek mythology, and they are also two spirits. The instinctive impulse represented by the sun god Apollo was the dream, like the dream builder in Inception, creating perceptible figurations that gave the world a picture of dreams. The representative art of the sun god spirit is sculpture, painting, architecture and other plastic arts, and there are also epics.
Dionysus, on the other hand, corresponds to drunkenness. In drunkenness, people reach the peak of their emotions and enter a state of self-forgetfulness that is "painful and happy".
Wine and art are also inextricably linked in traditional Chinese culture. Du Fu's "Eight Immortals in Drinking" describes the drunken state of the poet Li Bai, Caosheng Zhang Xu and other literati.
Li Baidou wine hundred poems, Chang'an City on the restaurant sleep, Tianzi called not to the ship, claiming that the subject is a wine immortal.
Zhang Xu's three cups of grass holy legend, taking off his hat and revealing the crown before the prince, waving the paper like a cloud of smoke.
Drunkenness makes people realize a state of freedom that is very difficult to be sober, Li Bai is difficult to refuse the call of the Son of Heaven when he is not drunk, and Zhang Xu will not take off his hat and show his head in front of the prince.
Correspondingly, Li Bai and Zhang Xu also gained a state of complete self-forgetfulness and freedom in drunkenness, and achieved complete liberation. This is also the peak moment of artistic creation, so that Li Bai can compose hundreds of poems, and Zhang Xu swings the paper like a cloud of smoke.
It is said that Zhang Xu woke up to see the cursive writing he had written while drunk, and raised his pen again, but he could not reproduce his previous state and could no longer write such words.
Dionysian impulses gave birth to art represented by Dionysian odes, lyric poems, and music.
Ancient Greek tragedies embody the dual spirit of the sun god and dionysus.
02
Tragedy is a specific art form, not a work in everyday language that says "tragedy" or a work with a sad ending.
Ancient Greek tragedies interpret characters and plots on stage, and there are song teams under the stage. The song team is part of the performance, participating in the plot of the tragedy, but also expressing the mood of the characters, dialogue, and also having the function of setting off the atmosphere, such as symbolizing a certain sound.
The song team is between the stage and the audience, and is the bridge between the stage and the stage, the intermediary of the audience and the performers.
This tragedy is the unity of the spirit of The Sun and Dionysus, the image created on the stage is the art of the Sun God, and the song team is the embodiment of the art of Dionysus.
"Tragedy is a dionysian song team that is cathartic again and again in the image world of the sun god."
Aristotle believed in Poetics that tragedy has a "purifying" effect, and the audience obtains emotional catharsis by feeling pity and fear for the fate and plot of the characters in the play.
In this "purification", the song team uses the chorus to guide the audience's emotions into the core of the Dionysian spirit.
The actors of ancient Greek tragedies are performed with masks, not one person playing a role fixedly, so there are very few actors in the whole play, and one actor can play multiple roles.
Just like the Peking Opera mostly uses the horse whip to replace the horse, there is no real horse, the tragedy is the same, the mask is only the fulcrum of the audience's imagination, the audience imagines how the protagonist is, then the character under the mask is how, so the audience's fantasy and imitation is the core of the tragedy, through the interpretation of the fate and behavior of the characters under the mask, the audience can understand the essence of the Dionysian impulse and gain insight into the pain of human beings in the face of eternity.
At the same time, the mask visualizes the spirit of Dionysus, reflecting the spirit of the sun god.
In short, the way in which the spirit of the sun god and the spirit of Dionysus exist in the tragedy is that the images such as the mask and the stage are integrated into the chorus of the song team, from the impulse of the god of the sun to a spirit of self-forgetful Dionysus, that is to say, the spirit of the god of the sun is a superficial excess, and finally reaches the depths of the spirit of Dionysus.
Therefore, the spirit of Dionysus is the core and subject of tragedy.
For example, the tragedy of King Oedipus was predestined by the oracle, and he himself had no subjective fault, he did not know his origins, let alone his mother.
Ordinary people are the same, often after many years, they realize that they are standing at the crossroads of fate at a certain point in time on a certain day, but at that moment, they are ignorant of this moment of fate.
Oedipus, who has glimpsed his own destiny, is everyone who is painful and powerless in the face of fate, and the finiteness and infinity of man constitute the tension between man and God.
Oedipus solved the mystery of the Sphinx, the intelligence of human beings, which is different from that of animals, is a challenge to God and a source of human suffering.
In the end, Oedipus pierced his eyes and eliminated his sins, which was both an acceptance of God's arrangement and a rebellion against fate.
At the end of the play, Captain Song connects the fate of Oedipus with the fate of mankind:
"When we wait to see the last day, don't say that a mortal is happy, until he has crossed the boundaries of life and has not yet attained the liberation of suffering."
Although people will be dazed in the face of fate, in the face of a powerful fate, people have not given up resistance, and it is this hopeless resistance that highlights human dignity and nobility. In this tragic rebellion, the courage and will of the people are enough to move all the audience.
Therefore, the Dionysian spirit reflected by the tragic characters leads the audience to resonate with the characters in the play through the mask and the song team, so that the audience's emotions reach the peak, thus entering the depths of the Dionysian spirit.
03
Although it's called The Birth of Tragedy, Neey devotes nearly half of the space to explaining the "demise of tragedy."
Reason, represented by Socrates, developed to today's scientism, killed the tragedy.
The decline of tragedy begins with the ancient Greek tragic writer Euripides.
Euripides's masterpiece is Medea. Euripides brought the audience to the stage, and the strength of the song team was weakened and became part of the stage.
The great paintings in the history of human art are all created in a non-market environment, and it is impossible to produce great works by catering to the market, and in order to cater to the mediocre public aesthetic, the independence of art has disappeared.
Tragedy no longer leads to insight into the truth, but becomes a pastime that caters to the masses. There is no longer something sublime in the play, but a continuation of everyday mediocre life.
This is only the beginning of the decline of tragedy, and the tragic death is injected into the field of art because of reason.
In Nietzsche's view, Euripides was the initiator of the tragic decline, and it was Socrates who completely killed the tragedy.
Socrates' famous sayings are "Know yourself", "Knowledge is virtue", "Mistakes are made because of ignorance", and so on.
Knowledge is the knowledge of reason, and knowledge occupies an important position from Socrates, and reason and logic invade art.
Reason is an objectified way of thinking, to borrow Heidegger's expression, rational thinking is to think about what kind of existence a thing is.
But art is not an object of reason.
The aesthetic thinking of art is an intuition, experience, and realize that things exist in themselves.
If reason thinks about "how things are"—how things exist," art confronts "that things are"—things are there.
Rational thinking is expressed as "What is this?" Aesthetic thinking, on the other hand, is "this exists."
Art is a kind of present realization, intuitive to pure existence.
The debate between Zhuangzi and Huishi's Haoliang embodies these two kinds of thinking, Huishi wants to get Zhuangzi's basis and reason for knowing the "joy of fish", but Zhuangzi's path is intuitive to the joy of fish on the haoliang.
The limitations of human rational cognition are highlighted by Kant, who demarcated the boundaries of reason and left a place for belief, morality, aesthetics, and other content that transcends the empirical world.
Whether "God is dead" or "superman", it is already seen in "The Birth of Tragedy", Nietzsche sees art as a way to rebel against God, tragedy can save human beings in nihilism, and the Dionysian spirit is the resistance after insight into the world's nothingness. This also echoes Nietzsche's statement in the preface that the mission of writing this book is to see science through the lens of the artist and art through the lens of life.