Name: The Birth of Tragedy
ISBN: 9780141935072

The Birth of Tragedy

A compelling argument for the necessity for art in life, Nietzsche's first book is fuelled by his enthusiasms for Greek tragedy, for the philosophy of Schopenhauer and for the music of Wagner, to whom this work was dedicated. Nietzsche outlined a distinction between its two central forces: the Apolline, representing beauty and order, and the Dionysiac, a primal or ecstatic reaction to the sublime. He believed the combination of these states produced the highest forms of music and tragic drama, which not only reveal the truth about suffering in life, but also provide a consolation for it. Impassioned and exhilarating in its conviction, The Birth of Tragedy has become a key text in European culture and in literary criticism.

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viccisOct 2026

If you found Schopenhauer's thoughts on it interesting, I'd recommend giving The Birth of Tragedy a read to see where a young Nietzsche took it, relating it to poetry.

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DiscourseFanMay 2023

I find this a very interesting overview, and I think the author addresses well the issues of "pure cognition" vs. the dynamic cognition of actual lived experience. However, while the reference to Heidegger was apt, I would also suggest people interested in this seemingly unbridgeable difference between the world and its representation read Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation, and if that doesn't fully satisfy you, also Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. The trouble that philosophy has always come across is the issue of how we are able, in a world which is at the bottom totally unrepresentable, to apply structural order and communicate with one another and affect things in the world and ourselves with such structural order--this is the basis for the philosophy of Plato. I think that so-called "analytic" philosophy, and the crude description of type-2 cognition (artistic, literary?) falls very short of this problem, as both fail to see how the so-called type 1 and 2 are intimately connected in our experience of the world. There is no "pure" rationality disconnected from reality, and yet there is also no pure reality which has not already fallen into a particular structural order.

(Anyway, I think the person who most rigorously attempts to grapple with this problem is Lacan; though given the difficulty of even discussing it--since its a question of symbolic structures itself--his writing can be very confusing at times and probably isn't an ideal place to start.)

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lddDec 2015

Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy

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theVirginianSep 2015

The Gay Science is another great Nietzsche book. Pick up The Birth of Tragedy if you get a chance though, Nietzche's early views on history and science are also worth reading and considering.

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jacobolusNov 2010

2000? Csíkszentmihályi’s book (Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play) which introduced the term flow was published in 1975.

Here’s a TED talk by Csíkszentmihályi (2004): http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.htm...

Also worth reading: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig, 1974), The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche, 1872)

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etypDec 2024

Nietzsche is a very interesting example since there is a very obvious shift in his philosophy from The Birth of Tragedy to, say, The Gay Science. I understand the argument that the style of writing noticeably changes, and I'd be okay attributing that to "automated writing," but a lot of the shift in Nietzsche's work feels like a pretty drastic shift in ideology. I'm not convinced that shift entirely, or even largely, comes from the shift in medium.

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