The Birth of Tragedy

Nietzsche's first book, published in 1872 while he was a young professor of classical philology at Basel, and dedicated to Richard Wagner. It argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two artistic forces named after two gods: the Apollonian, the world of dream, clear form, image and individuation, and the Dionysian, the world of intoxication, music and the dissolving of the individual into a larger whole. Tragedy, born from the music of the satyr chorus, let the Greeks face the terror of existence and still affirm it; only as an aesthetic phenomenon, Nietzsche says, are existence and the world justified. Tragedy died when Euripides and Socrates replaced myth and music with rational optimism. The closing sections hope for a rebirth of tragic culture in German music, above all Wagner's. Classical scholars attacked the book on its appearance, and the 1886 edition added Nietzsche's own 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism'.

Its contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian has passed into everyday thinking about art, and it shows the early form of Nietzsche's question of how to affirm life despite suffering.