Reading Questions:  
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music

Please read all of The Birth of Tragedy, but in the following sections you can read lightly and not worry too much about the details:   ¶s 6; 11-12; 19; 21-22.

As you will see, in sections 1-16 Nietzsche develops his analysis of Greek culture; in sections 16-25, he applies that analysis to “analogous phenomena of our own time.” (¶ numbers refer to sections in any edition; page numbers refer to the Dover edition.)

1. What is the Dionysian principle?  What is the Apollonian principle?  What kinds of psychic states do they involve?  What sorts of art exemplify them?  What do they have to do with “illusion?” with “individuation?”

2. How were the Dionysian and Apollonian principles related to one another in ancient Greek culture?  What was tragedy?  How did it balance those principles?

3. What does Nietzsche mean when he describes the tragic hero as suffering from “the agonies of individuation?” (¶10, p. 34)

4. What is the significance of the “tragic myth?”  What does it do for the individual?  For society?

5. What destroyed the tragic culture of the Greeks?  Who was Socrates, and what effect did he have?  Why does Nietzsche call him “theoretical man?”  What's so bad about that?

6. What is an Alexandrian culture?  How does it compare with a tragic culture?

7. What features of his own society might Nietzsche have in mind when describing Socrates, Euripides, and Alexandrian culture?

8. What kind of hope is Nietzsche expressing when he claims to see “a gradual awakening of the Dionysian spirit in our modern world?” (¶19, p. 72)  What do you make of the two paragraphs at the end of ¶20 that begin “Let no one attempt to trouble our faith in an impending rebirth of Hellenic antiquity…” (p. 75)?  What is he trying to do with language like this?  Who might have found it appealing?

9. “Out of the Dionysian root of the German spirit a power has arisen which, having nothing in common with the primitive conditions of Socratic culture…is…felt by this culture as something terribly inexplicable and overwhelmingly hostile.  I refer, of course, to German music as we must understand it, particularly in its vast solar orbit from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner” (¶19, p. 72).  Why German music and the German spirit?

10. “Without myth every culture loses the healthy natural power of its creativity:  only a horizon defined by myths completes and unifies a whole cultural movement” (¶23, p. 85).  Ponder.  Just what cultural and social functions are myths supposed to serve?