The Birth of Tragedy

Nietzsche proposes that art “derives its continuous development from the duality of the Apolline and Dionysiac” (14), which are two opposing aesthetic tendencies. We can compare these two tendencies to the states of dreaming and drunkenness, respectively. The world of dreams gives us insight into a reality beyond the everyday world in which we live. Whereas the Apolline tendency brings us a calm sense of our individual existence (comparable to dreaming), the Dionysiac—as experienced, for instance, in drunkenness—awakens powerful urges that make us forget ourselves, absorbing us into a “higher community” and involving us in wild collective revelry.

Starting in Chapter 5, Nietzsche attempts to explain the origin of tragedy within Greek culture. He argues that the poets Homer and Archilochus, with their epic and lyric poetry, helped pave the way for tragedy. Folk poetry and folk song are born out of a union of the Dionysiac and Apolline and out of an attempt to make language “imitate music.” Music itself is the expression of the universal will (See: Index of Terms), which embodies the primal sense of life as “contradiction” and “suffering” and is beyond the power of language to express.