The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music

"This is an amazing book. Nietzsche was very young when he became a professor of Classics , and this is the first book he wrote. I think he intended it quite seriously, but this book was considered so bizarre that it ended his academic career as soon as it had begun. But that set him free to become the Nietzsche that we know today. Because he lost his academic career straight away, he could then have a lot more fun with his writing and his thinking. For example, by the end of his career he had titled his autobiography Ecce Homo (‘Behold the Man’) , which is how Pontius Pilate presented Jesus to the mob for crucifixion; and it had chapter titles such as ‘Why I am so wise’ and ‘Why I write such good books’. Fantastic trolling. But The Birth of Tragedy is a young Nietzsche still earnestly trying to be a sensible academic. Nietzsche argued that within culture, there are two opposing forces—the Dionysian force and the Apollonian force. On the one hand Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of chaos, passion, and what we’d call the darker aspects of human nature, as well as its most ambiguous and unpredictable aspects. On the other hand Apollo, who in ancient Greek mythology was the God of medicine and sunlight and prophecy, was quite rational. Both sides coexist in a person and in a society. Ancient Greek culture paid a lot of tribute to Apollo and had a love of order and rationality, but they also had periods when they celebrated chaos and held Dionysian festivals. Nietzsche believed you had to acknowledge both, and you had to let both coexist, and he thought that tragedy was the art form that best ‘held’ and balanced both at the same time. The art form of tragedy teaches us to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, and enduring ambivalence. For Nietzsche, having this psychological, aesthetic skill or disposition was essential for being able to navigate the contradictory hopes and fears of our own human nature—the same unconscious hopes and fears that Jameson says really underpin the political visions of utopia and dystopia. Our understanding of tragedy is why we can spend our lives trying to create ‘the good place’ while knowing that it doesn’t exist. Where Nietzsche thought that modern Europe had gone wrong was in pursuing only the Apollonian and believing we could ignore the Dionysian. He says it’s a mistake to think that we can have a truly happy ending, and it’s a mistake to think that our storyline is not, in reality, a bittersweet tragedy. “Utopia is an impossibility, and yet we still feel compelled to think about it a lot” Nietzsche was concerned that modern Europe was losing a cultural ability to understand tragedy and instead was seduced by a Judeo-Christian wish for a powerful saviour to redeem us. He predicted that modern Europe would put its faith in a kind of future technoscientific utopia, a fantasy of Apollonian rationality and order saving us from ourselves. In this collective cultural fantasy, science and technology are assigned an almost messianic role—Nietzsche called it a deus ex machina, science and technology coming down from the clouds like an angel dispensing tidy solutions, or science and technology charging in like a knight in shining armour to vanquish all our problems and take us to safety. And of course it’s not true: we already have amazing science and technology, but our fundamental problems of dystopia remain, and instead of thinking critically about that we seem to think that more science and more technology is the solution. Famine is a compelling example of this. Famines are not caused by there not being enough food to go around, famines are caused by inequalities and greed and political decision-making. Looking to science and technology to increase agricultural production or efficiency is not going to solve the fundamental problem, which is that, as humans, we find ways to be greedy or chaotic or cruel—our Dionysian aspects. Science and technology can’t save us from what we carry within us as humans, and placing our hopes on the wrong thing sets ourselves up for disaster. The book has a brilliant section about how the modern rhetoric of eternal progress will actually create social unrest because it will create the belief that we should all be at these sunlit uplands, that this mass elevation should have happened already. So it’s not just that science and technology can’t save us from ourselves, but also that the rhetoric of linear progress, of marching on endlessly into the light through science and technology, will actually create unhappiness and conflict when this utopia doesn’t materialise. I find that really interesting. It was, but not popular at the time. Probably not popular now, either."