The Birth of Tragedy contains the germ of much of Nietzsche’s later thought, in which the relation of knowledge of the true and the question of its goodness or benefit becomes the primary question, a question first raised by Socrates and raised again by Nietzsche.įrom 1873 to 1876 Nietzsche wrote his Untimely Meditations. The Apollonian and Dionysian pair become transformed into the oppositions between thought and affects, reason and passion, and from there the discussion moves from Euripides to Socrates, and the problem he represents. Nietzsche, by contrast, defines ancient Greek culture by the opposition between the Apollonian dream and Dionysian intoxication, which he develops into the pairs “individual and community,” “family and city,” “law-convention and nature,” “image and music,” and “appearance and illusion.” He discerns the tension between the beauty of the Olympian gods and the terror of tragedy but finds terror to be the more fundamental and original source, even of the Apollonian. Winckelmann portrayed ancient Greece as rational, noble, and serene. The book questions the dominant eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portrait of Greek culture, rooted in Johann Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art (1764). Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, in 1872.
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