The Birth of Tragedy

“[T]o see science under the lens of the artist, but art under the lens of life.”

This passage is Nietzsche’s description in his prefatory “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” of the rereleased edition, explaining what he hoped to achieve in The Birth of Tragedy. He wanted to examine science critically from an aesthetic standpoint, putting into question its assumptions to explain all of reality. At the same time, he wanted to examine art, not as a technical procedure, but as an expression and part of life itself.

“Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and talk, and is about to fly dancing into the heavens.”

Nietzsche describes the effects that the Dionysian spirit has on human beings: It makes them forget their individuality and joins them together in a joyous collective revelry. The passage typifies his rapturous, poetic style in the book while also invoking The Redemptive Power of Art in human society.

“How else could life have been borne by a race so sensitive, so impetuous in its desires, so uniquely capable of suffering, if it had not been revealed to them, haloed in a higher glory, in their gods?”

Nietzsche theorizes here that the Greeks used the Olympian gods, with their glorious power and joyous myths, as a sort of buffer between themselves and the horrific tragedy of life: a foreshadowing of how they would later use Apolline values to erase Dionysian ones.