[The following is summary. The original text is reproduced below.]
Friedrich Nietzsche
7
Nietzsche will build from the aesthetic principles he previously developed. This will allow him to account for the origins of Greek tragedy.
Traditionally the origin was thought to be the chorus: the original tragedies only had choral parts. This is according to Aristotle.
Tragedy then gradually evolved as men developed each element that came to light and after going through many changes, it stopped when it had found its own natural form. Thus it was Aeschylus who first raised the number of the actors from one to two. He also curtailed the chorus and gave the dialogue the leading part. Three actors and scene-painting Sophocles introduced. (Aristotle: Poetics, iv, 1449a)
But if there was no other characters than the chorus, this forces us to see the archetypal drama as lacking two roles that we now think chorus have:
1) being the idealized spectator, or
2) representing the populace over against the noble class.
However, Aristotle proposed that the chorus comes to take on this representation of the populace as the moral voice against the wrongful deeds of kings:
And ‘right’ must be taken in the sense of ‘equally right,’ and this means right in regard to the interest of the whole state and in regard to the common welfare of the citizens; and a citizen is in general one who shares in governing and being governed, although he is different according to each form of constitution, but in relation to the best form a citizen is one who has the capacity and the will to be governed and to govern with a view to the life in accordance with virtue. (Aristotle, Politics, iii. 8. 6, 1284b)
Nietzsche disagrees. Tragedy's origin is purely religious. It's not political.
Schlegel proffers another incorrect theory. He says that the chorus is the quintessence of the audience. It is the 'ideal spectator.' (Kaufmann 57a) His theory's brilliant. But it's inaccurate. The chorus was never the detached audience. It witnessed the actions unfold just as the characters do, and not as though from an offstage real world. We as the audience may see the action as a spectacle, in our detached way. However, the chorus is part of the spectacle, and not merely a witness to it. Hence without a spectacle, the chorus cannot be a spectator.
So Nietzsche has dispelled these two incorrect explanations.
We suspect that the birth of tragedy can be explained neither by any reverence for the moral intelligence of the multitude nor by the notion of a spectator without drama (Nietzsche Channel)
Schlegel had an "infinitely more valuable insight.... he regards the chorus as a living wall that tragedy constructs around itself in order to close itself off from the world of reality and to preserve its ideal domain and its poetical freedom." (Kaufmann 58) Hence the chorus wages war against naturalism in art (58b)
The chorus' ideal realm is "a domain raised high above the actual paths of mortals." (58c)
The Greek has built for his chorus the scaffolding of a fictitious state of nature and placed thereon fictitious beings of nature. Tragedy developed on this foundation, and so has been exempt since its beginning from the embarrassing task of copying actuality. (NC)
But this non-natural tragic realm is in fact super-natural, like Olympus. What is curious and perplexing, however, is why the Satyr represents the Dionysian tragic voice.
Nietzsche theorizes. Dionysian music bears a certain relation to civilization. And we noted before that Dionysian revelers are absorbed into each other. Their sense of individuality is eliminated. They all feel as one. Nietzsche thinks that the Satyr chorus is similar. The metaphysical solace — with which, I wish to say at once, all true tragedy sends us away — that, despite every phenomenal change life is at bottom indestructibly joyful and powerful, was expressed most concretely in the chorus of satyrs, beings of nature who dwell behind all civilization and preserve their identity through every change of generations and historical movement. (NC)
According to Wagner, civilization is "nullified by music just as lamplight is nullified by the light of day." Nietzsche adds,
Similarly, I believe, the Greek man of culture felt himself nullified in the presence of the satyric chorus; and this is the most immediate effect of the Dionysian tragedy, that the state and society and, quite generally, the gulfs between man and man give way to an overwhelming feeling of unity leading back to the very heart of nature. (Kaufmann 59)
The Greeks were very sensitive. They were "uniquely susceptible to the tenderest and deepest suffering." (59) On account of this, they very easily could have resorted to a Buddhist-like negation of their will. They were able to look "boldly right into the terrible destructiveness of so-called world history." This might make them feel alone and threatened. But the Dionysian ecstasy allowed them instead to survive these emotions, to feel one with humanity and the world. "He was saved by art, and through art life reclaimed him." (NC)
Dionysian ecstasies separate everyday reality from Dionysian reality. When they emerged back into everyday reality, it made them nauseous. For, they found that an ascetic, will-negating mood is involved in experiencing reality in such a mundane way.
Consider Hamlet's famous deliberations. He was inactive. Immobilized. By what? His knowledge. His understanding that none of his actions could "change anything in the eternal nature of things." People with such knowledge
feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no — true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man." (Kaufmann 60)
Hence Dionysian revelers have a certain lethargy when they are occupied with the everyday world. They have knowledge of things eternal and extraordinary. The everyday world is a pointless endeavor. Action only has meaning when we dance revelously.
Art saves such Dionysian people. The world's utter absurdity, cruelty, and pointlessness can be terrifying. But when it is rendered artistically in tragedy, we rejoice in it. It becomes sublime. And when comedies make us laugh at life's absurdities and pointless trifles by artistically exaggerating them, we discharge our feelings of nausea induced by these absurdities ubiquitous in life.
Then, in this supreme jeopardy of the will, art, that sorceress expert in healing, approaches him; only she can turn his fits of nausea into imaginations with which it is possible to live. These are on the one hand the sublime, which subjugates terror by means of art; on the other hand the comic, which releases us, through art, from the tedium of absurdity. The satyr chorus of the dithyramb was the salvation of Greek art; the threatening paroxysms I have mentioned were contained by the intermediary of those Dionysian attendants. (NC)
From the Nietzsche Channel translation:
7
At this point we need to call upon every aesthetic principle so far discussed, in order to find our way through the labyrinthine origins of Greek tragedy. I believe I am saying nothing extravagant when I claim that the problem of these origins has never even been posed, much less solved, no matter how often the elusive rags of ancient tradition have been speculatively sewn together and ripped apart That tradition tells us in no uncertain terms that tragedy arose out of the tragic chorus [Aristotle: Poetics, iv, 1449a] and was, to begin with, nothing but chorus. We are thus bound to scan the chorus closely as the archetypal drama, disregarding the current explanations of it as the idealized spectator, or as representing the populace over against the noble realm of the set. The latter interpretation, which sounds so grandly edifying to certain politicians (as though the democratic Athenians had represented in the popular chorus the invariable moral law, always right in face of the passionate misdeeds and extravagances of kings) may have been suggested by a phrase in Aristotle [Politics, iii. 8. 6, 1284b], but this lofty notion can have had no influence whatever on the original formation of tragedy, whose purely religious origins would exclude not only the opposition between the people and their rulers but any kind of political or social context. Likewise we would consider it blasphemous, in the light of the classical form of the chorus as we know it from Aeschylus and Sophocles, to speak of a foreshadowing of a "constitutional popular representation," though others have not stuck at such blasphemy. No ancient polity ever embodied constitutional popular representation in praxi [in practice], and one dares to hope that ancient tragedy did not even "foreshadow" it.
Much more famous than this political explanation of the chorus is the notion of A. W. Schlegel [Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (On Dramatic Art and Literature) (1808)], who advises us to regard the chorus as the quintessence of the audience, as the "ideal spectator." If we hold this view against the historical tradition according to which tragedy was, in the beginning, nothing but chorus, it turns out to be a crude, unscholarly, though dazzling hypothesis—dazzling because of the effective formulation, the typically German bias for anything called "ideal," and our momentary wonder at the notion. For we are indeed amazed when we compare our familiar theater audience with the tragic chorus and ask ourselves whether the former could conceivably be construed into something analogous to the latter. We tacitly deny the possibility, and then are brought to wonder both at the boldness of Schlegel's assertion and at what must have been the totally different complexion of the Greek audience. We had supposed all along that the spectator, whoever he might be, would always have to remain conscious of the fact that he had before him a work of art, not empiric reality, whereas the tragic chorus of the Greeks is constrained to view the characters enacted on the stage as veritably existing. The chorus of the Oceanides think that they behold the actual Titan Prometheus, and believe themselves every bit as real as the god. Are we seriously to assume that the highest and purest type of spectator is he who, like the Oceanides, regards the god as physically present and real? That it is characteristic of the ideal spectator to rush on stage and deliver the god from his fetters? We had put our faith in an artistic audience, believing that the more intelligent the individual spectator was, the more capable he was of viewing the work of art as art; and now Schlegel's theory suggests to us that the perfect spectator viewed the world of the stage not at all as art but as reality. Oh these Greeks! we moan; they upset our entire aesthetic! But once we have grown accustomed to it, we repeat Schlegel's pronouncement whenever the question of the chorus comes up.
The emphatic tradition I spoke of militates against Schlegel: chorus as such, without stage—the primitive form of tragedy—is incompatible with that chorus of ideal spectators. What sort of artistic genre would it be that derived from the idea of the spectator and crystallized itself in the mode of the "pure" spectator ["Zuschauer an sich"]? A spectator without drama is an absurdity. We suspect that the birth of tragedy can be explained neither by any reverence for the moral intelligence of the multitude nor by the notion of a spectator without drama, and, altogether, we consider the problem much too complex to be touched by such facile interpretations.
An infinitely more valuable insight into the significance of the chorus was furnished by Schiller in the famous preface to his Bride of Messina [Über den Gebrauch des Chors in der Tragödie (On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy), published as the preface to his play Die Braut von Messina (The Bride of Messina) (1803)], where the chorus is seen as a living wall which tragedy draws about itself in order to achieve insulation from the actual world, to preserve its ideal ground and its poetic freedom.
Schiller used this view as his main weapon against commonplace naturalism, against the illusionistic demand made upon dramatic poetry. While the day of the stage was conceded to be artificial, the architecture of the set symbolic, the metrical discourse stylized, a larger misconception still prevailed. Schiller was not content to have what constitutes the very essence of poetry merely tolerated as poetic license. He insisted that the introduction of the chorus was the decisive step by which any naturalism in art was openly challenged. This way of looking at art seems to me the one which our present age, thinking itself so superior, has labeled "pseudo-idealism." But I very much fear that we, with our idolatry of verisimilitude, have arrived at the opposite pole of all idealism, the realm of the waxworks. This too betrays a kind of art, as do certain popular novels of today. All I ask is that we not be importuned by the pretense that such art has left Goethe's and Schiller's "pseudo-idealism" behind.
It is certainly true, as Schiller saw, that the Greek chorus of satyrs, the chorus of primitive tragedy, moved on ideal ground, a ground raised high above the common path of mortals. The Greek has built for his chorus the scaffolding of a fictitious state of nature and placed thereon fictitious beings of nature. Tragedy developed on this foundation, and so has been exempt since its beginning from the embarrassing task of copying actuality. All the same, the world of tragedy is by no means a world arbitrarily projected between heaven and earth; rather it is a world having the same reality and credibility as Olympus possessed for the devout Greek. The satyr, as the Dionysian chorist, dwells in a reality sanctioned by myth and ritual. That tragedy should begin with him, that the Dionysian wisdom of tragedy should speak through him, is as puzzling a phenomenon as, more generally, the origin of tragedy from the chorus. Perhaps we can gain a starting point for this inquiry by claiming that the satyr, that fictitious being of nature, stands to cultured man in the same relation as Dionysian music does to civilization. Richard Wagner has said of the latter that it is absorbed by music as lamplight by daylight [in Wagner's essay Beethoven (1870)]. In the same manner, I believe, the cultured Greek felt himself absorbed into the satyr chorus, and in the next development of Greek tragedy state and society, in fact all that separated man from man, gave way before an overwhelming sense of unity which led back into the heart of nature. The metaphysical solace—with which, I wish to say at once, all true tragedy sends us away—that, despite every phenomenal change life is at bottom indestructibly joyful and powerful, was expressed most concretely in the chorus of satyrs, beings of nature who dwell behind all civilization and preserve their identity through every change of generations and historical movement.
With this chorus the profound Greek, so uniquely susceptible to the subtlest and deepest suffering, who had penetrated the destructive agencies of both nature and history, solaced himself. Though he had been in danger of craving a Buddhistic denial of the will, he was saved by art, and through art life reclaimed him.
While the transport of the Dionysian state, with its suspension of all the ordinary barriers of existence, lasts, it carries with it a lethargical element in which everything that has been experienced by the individual is drowned. This chasm of oblivion separates the quotidian reality from the Dionysian. But as soon as that quotidian reality enters consciousness once more it is viewed with loathing, and the consequence is an ascetic, abulic state of mind. In this sense Dionysian man might be said to resemble Hamlet: both have looked deeply into the true nature of things, they have gained knowledge and are now loath to act. They realize that no action of theirs can work any change in the eternal condition of things, and they regard the imputation as ludicrous or debasing that they should set right the time which is out of joint. Knowledge kills action, for in order to act we require the veil of illusion—such is Hamlet's doctrine, not to be confounded with the cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer, who through too much reflection, as it were a surplus of possibilities, never arrives at action!— What, both in the case of Hamlet and of Dionysian man, overbalances any motive leading to action, is not reflection but knowledge, the apprehension of truth and its terror. Now no comfort any longer avails, desire reaches beyond the transcendental world, beyond the gods themselves, and existence, together with its glittering reflection in the gods and an immortal Beyond, is denied. The truth once seen, man is aware everywhere of the ghastly absurdity of existence, comprehends the symbolism of Ophelia's fate and the wisdom of the wood sprite Silenus: nausea invades him.
Then, in this supreme jeopardy of the will, art, that sorceress expert in healing, approaches him; only she can turn his fits of nausea into imaginations with which it is possible to live. These are on the one hand the sublime, which subjugates terror by means of art; on the other hand the comic, which releases us, through art, from the tedium of absurdity. The satyr chorus of the dithyramb was the salvation of Greek art; the threatening paroxysms I have mentioned were contained by the intermediary of those Dionysian attendants.
Aristotle. Poetics. in Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 23. Transl. W.H. Fyfe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1932. Available online at:
Aristotle. Politics. in Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 21. Transl. H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1944. Available online at:
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. in Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Transl. & Ed. WalterKaufmann. New York: The Modern Library, 1966.
Nietzsche Channel version available online at:
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