[late in the year 1888, not long before he was overcome by his sudden attack of insanity, nietzsche wrote down a few notes concerning his early work, the birth of tragedy. these were printed in his sister's biography (das leben friedrich nietzsches, vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 102 ff.), and are here translated as likely to be of interest to readers of this remarkable work. they also appear in the ecce homo.—translator's note.]
"to be just to the birth of tragedy(1872), one will have to forget some few things. it has wrought effects, it even fascinated through that wherein it was amiss—through its application to wagnerism, just as if this wagnerism were symptomatic of a rise and going up. and just on that account was the book an event in wagner's life: from thence and only from thence were great hopes linked to the name of wagner. even to-day people remind me, sometimes right in the midst of a talk on parsifal, that i and none other have it on my conscience that such a high opinion of the cultural value of this movement came to the top. more than once have i found the book referred to as 'the re-birth of tragedy out of the spirit of music': one only had an ear for a new formula of wagner's art, aim, task,—and failed to hear[pg 190] withal what was at bottom valuable therein. 'hellenism and pessimism' had been a more unequivocal title: namely, as a first lesson on the way in which the greeks got the better of pessimism,—on the means whereby they overcame it. tragedy simply proves that the greeks were no pessimists: schopenhauer was mistaken here as he was mistaken in all other things. considered with some neutrality, the birth of tragedy appears very unseasonable: one would not even dream that it was begun amid the thunders of the battle of w?rth. i thought these problems through and through before the walls of metz in cold september nights, in the midst of the work of nursing the sick; one might even believe the book to be fifty years older. it is politically indifferent—un-german one will say to-day,—it smells shockingly hegelian, in but a few formul? does it scent of schopenhauer's funereal perfume. an 'idea'—the antithesis of 'dionysian versus apollonian'—translated into metaphysics; history itself as the evolution of this 'idea'; the antithesis dissolved into oneness in tragedy; through this optics things that had never yet looked into one another's face, confronted of a sudden, and illumined and comprehended through one another: for instance, opera and revolution. the two decisive innovations of the book are, on the one hand, the comprehension of the dionysian phenomenon among the greeks (it gives the first psychology thereof, it sees therein the one root of all grecian art); on the other, the comprehension of socratism: socrates diagnosed for the first time as the tool[pg 191] of grecian dissolution, as a typical decadent. 'rationality' against instinct! 'rationality' at any price as a dangerous, as a life-undermining force! throughout the whole book a deep hostile silence on christianity: it is neither apollonian nor dionysian; it negatives all ?sthetic values (the only values recognised by the birth of tragedy), it is in the widest sense nihilistic, whereas in the dionysian symbol the utmost limit of affirmation is reached. once or twice the christian priests are alluded to as a 'malignant kind of dwarfs,' as 'subterraneans.'"
2.
"this beginning is singular beyond measure. i had for my own inmost experience discovered the only symbol and counterpart of history,—i had just thereby been the first to grasp the wonderful phenomenon of the dionysian. and again, through my diagnosing socrates as a decadent, i had given a wholly unequivocal proof of how little risk the trustworthiness of my psychological grasp would run of being weakened by some moralistic idiosyncrasy—to view morality itself as a symptom of decadence is an innovation, a novelty of the first rank in the history of knowledge. how far i had leaped in either case beyond the smug shallow-pate-gossip of optimism contra pessimism! i was the first to see the intrinsic antithesis: here, the degenerating instinct which, with subterranean vindictiveness, turns against life (christianity, the philosophy of schopenhauer, in a certain sense already the philosophy of plato, all idealistic[pg 192] systems as typical forms), and there, a formula of highest affirmation, born of fullness and overfullness, a yea-saying without reserve to suffering's self, to guilt's self, to all that is questionable and strange in existence itself. this final, cheerfullest, exuberantly mad-and-merriest yea to life is not only the highest insight, it is also the deepest, it is that which is most rigorously confirmed and upheld by truth and science. naught that is, is to be deducted, naught is dispensable; the phases of existence rejected by the christians and other nihilists are even of an infinitely higher order in the hierarchy of values than that which the instinct of decadence sanctions, yea durst sanction. to comprehend this courage is needed, and, as a condition thereof, a surplus of strength: for precisely in degree as courage dares to thrust forward, precisely according to the measure of strength, does one approach truth. perception, the yea-saying to reality, is as much a necessity to the strong as to the weak, under the inspiration of weakness, cowardly shrinking, and flight from reality—the 'ideal.' ... they are not free to perceive: the decadents have need of the lie,—it is one of their conditions of self-preservation. whoso not only comprehends the word dionysian, but also grasps his self in this word, requires no refutation of plato or of christianity or of schopenhauer—he smells the putrefaction."
3.
"to what extent i had just thereby found the concept 'tragic,' the definitive perception of the [pg 193] psychology of tragedy, i have but lately stated in the twilight of the idols, page 139 (1st edit.): 'the affirmation of life, even in its most unfamiliar and severe problems, the will to life, enjoying its own inexhaustibility in the sacrifice of its highest types,—that is what i called dionysian, that is what i divined as the bridge to a psychology of the tragic poet. not in order to get rid of terror and pity, not to purify from a dangerous passion by its vehement discharge (it was thus that aristotle misunderstood it); but, beyond terror and pity, to realise in fact the eternal delight of becoming, that delight which even involves in itself the joy of annihilating![1] in this sense i have the right to understand myself to be the first tragic philosopher—that is, the utmost antithesis and antipode to a pessimistic philosopher. prior to myself there is no such translation of the dionysian into the philosophic pathos: there lacks the tragic wisdom,—i have sought in vain for an indication thereof even among the great greeks of philosophy, the thinkers of the two centuries before socrates. a doubt still possessed me as touching heraclitus, in whose proximity i in general begin to feel warmer and better than anywhere else. the affirmation of transiency and annihilation, to wit the decisive factor in a dionysian philosophy, the yea-saying to antithesis and war, to becoming, with radical rejection even of the concept 'being,'—that i must directly acknowledge as, of all thinking hitherto, the nearest to my own. the doctrine of[pg 194] 'eternal recurrence,' that is, of the unconditioned and infinitely repeated cycle of all things—this doctrine of zarathustra's might after all have been already taught by heraclitus. at any rate the portico[2] which inherited well-nigh all its fundamental conceptions from heraclitus, shows traces thereof."
facsimile of nietzsches handwriting.
4.
"in this book speaks a prodigious hope. in fine, i see no reason whatever for taking back my hope of a dionysian future for music. let us cast a glance a century ahead, let us suppose my assault upon two millenniums of anti-nature and man-vilification succeeds! that new party of life which will take in hand the greatest of all tasks, the upbreeding of mankind to something higher,—add thereto the relentless annihilation of all things degenerating and parasitic, will again make possible on earth that too-much of life, from which there also must needs grow again the dionysian state. i promise a tragic age: the highest art in the yea-saying to life, tragedy, will be born anew, when mankind have behind them the consciousness of the hardest but most necessary wars, without suffering therefrom. a psychologist might still add that what i heard in my younger years in wagnerian music had in general naught to do with wagner; that when i described wagnerian music i described what i had heard, that i had instinctively to translate and transfigure all into the new spirit which i bore within myself...."
