The Birth of Tragedy

Nietzsche confronts the paradox that tragedy, although depicting terrible suffering, gives pleasure to its audience. In the ancient period, Aristotle argued that tragedy does this by bringing about a catharsis, the purging of pent-up feelings of fear and pity. Nietzsche’s answer in The Birth of Tragedy is somewhat similar to Aristotle’s, as he argues that tragedy—and the best of art in general—offers release and redemption for humans by helping them confront the tragic realities of existence.

For Nietzsche, life and reality are fundamentally tragic and meaningless, since human beings are at the mercy of an indifferent universal will. However, art has the power to transform this “horror and absurdity of existence” (40) into something that one finds beautiful and longs to experience again and again. It does this by dressing up terrible tragic reality with Apolline artifice, which Nietzsche defines as beautiful appearance or illusion, in the process rendering it attractive. Nietzsche names the sublime and the comic as two aesthetic qualities that transform the tragedy and absurdity of existence into something pleasing to behold.

In this way, art is more than an “imitation of nature,” as it was understood by Aristotle and other ancient thinkers, but is its own separate reality, “a metaphysical supplement to the truth of nature, coexisting with it in order to overcome it” (114).