The Birth of Tragedy · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
APPENDIX.
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 Wörth. 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 formulæ 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 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 _æsthetic_ 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.'"
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.