悲剧的诞生

牛津大学出版百年旗舰产品，权威英文版本原汁原味呈现，资深编辑专为阅读进阶定制，文学评论名家妙趣横生解读。 

希腊艺术历来引起美学家们的极大兴趣。在尼采之前，德国启蒙运动的代表人物均以人与自然、感情与理性的和谐来说明希腊艺术繁荣的原因。在《悲剧的诞生》中，尼采一反传统，认为希腊艺术的繁荣不是源于希腊人内心的和谐，而是源于他们内心的痛苦和冲突：因为过于看清人生的悲剧性质，所以产生日神和酒神两种艺术冲动，要用艺术来拯救人生。尼采的美学观影响了一大批作家、艺术家的人生观及其作品的思想内容。?

弗里德里希·尼采（Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844—1900）　著名德国思想家，诗人哲学家。他强力批判西方传统的基督教文化，否定基督教传统的道德体系，主张重估一切价值；他提倡创造一种生存的意义，为后来的存在主义奠定了基础，被誉为存在主义的先驱之一；他热爱生命，提倡昂然的生命力和奋发的意志力，肯定人世间的价值，给欧洲古典哲学注入新鲜血液并开辟了古典语言学的崭新时代。从这个意义上说，他开创了人类思想史的新纪元，哲学史可以以尼采前和尼采后来划分。在尼采之后，传统的哲学体系解体了，哲学由非存在转变为存在，从天上回到地上，由神奇莫测、玄而又玄转变为引起亿万人心灵的无限共鸣。

Introduction Note on the TranslationSelect BibliographyA Chronology of Friedrich NietzscheTHE BIRTH OF TRAGEDYExplanatory NotesIndex

The birth of tragedy is a book about beginnings and endings—the beginning and end of Greek tragedy and the beginning and end of the decadence of nineteenth century German culture It also marks a beginning and end in Nietzsche’s life—the beginning of his career as a freelance philosopher and the end of his career as a professional academic. As be?ts a work so concernedwith origins, it is a book which in its present form begins not once but twice, ?rst with the preface to the second edition of 1886,then with the original dedication to Richard Wagner of 1872.This double beginning signals the difference between the early and the late Nietzsche, but also foregrounds one of the major themes of the book—the ambiguity of dual origins, particularly with respect to the twin impulses of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. This ambiguity points in turn into the ambiguity of the book itself as both a historical study of the origin of Greek tragedy and a manifesto for the regeneration of contemporary German culture through music This introduction will examine these questions in the course of an exploration of the birth of tragedy in terms of its intellectual and historical contexts, Its argument, and the subsequent development of Nietzsche‘s ideas and their legacy to later generations of writers and thinkers.ContextsNietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy in 1872 at the age of 28, three years after being appointed Extraordinary Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basle in Switzerland. It was his ?rst book and might have been expected to mark the ?rst major step in an academic career. In fact, it provoked a polemic which was effectively to end his career as a professional classicist, partly because of its manifest, and at limes overriding, concern with contemporary rather than ancient culture and philosophy.This concern was to motivate and inform all of Nietzsche’s subsequent work, although he would continue Io refer to the examples of classical culture throughout his career. The close association between The Birth of Tragedy and contemporary political events is signalled at points in the book by allusions to the recent Franco-Prussian War of 1870, in which Nietzsche brie?y served as medical orderly before contracting dysentery and being invalided out of the army. In fact, Nietzsche wrote most of the book while on convalescent leave from the University of Basle in 1871. For the young Nietzsche, the recent military triumph over France and the subsequent foundation of the German Empire under Wilhelm I represented an enormous opportunity for the cultural regeneration of the newly uni?ed nation. For Nietzsche, as for many of his contemporaries, these hopes were invested in German music and in the work of the composer Richard Wagner in particular:To sympathetic contemporary listeners, Wagner‘s operas appeared to offer both an innovative musical aesthetics and a revival of traditional mythical content, elements of progress and continuity which appealed to a nation and culture in transition. Both elements—the aesthetics of music and myth—play a crucial role in The Birth of Tragedy. Partly as a result of Wagner‘s theory and practice, the aesthetics of music occupied a central place in the European culture of the time. As a non-representational form of art, music appeared to offer an escape from the con?nes of mid-nineteenth-century realism and swiftly became the model art of the Symbolist movement, its status epitomized by Walter Pater’s celebrated declaration of 1873 that ‘all art aspires to the condition of music’ (Studies: in the History of the Renaissances).This music-based aesthetics in many ways marks the beginning of the ‘art for art’s sake‘ movement, with its insistence on the autonomy of art from outside forces and the primacy of aesthetic PVC” moral criteria, a sentiment echoed in Nietzsche’s repeated insistence in The Birth of Tragedy that existence can only be justi?ed as an aesthetic phenomenon (§§ 5, 24). Furthermore, in more detailed formal terms, the tendency of contemporary music and that of Wagner in particular, to move away from harmony through chromaticism towards dissonance offered to artists working in other media the example of an art freed from traditional notions of the beautiful and opened up the possibility of an aesthetics premised on jarring contrasts of style and content. The exemplary status ascribed to music received philosophical justi?cation in the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, together with Wagner the most important early in?uence on Nietzsche’s work. For Schopenhauer, music possessed an ontological signi?cance—unlike other more super?cial arts, it revealed truths about the nature of being itself. The key to Schopenhauer’s interpretation of music lies in his elaboration of two notions inherited from Immanuel Kant—the phenomenon (Erscheinung) and the thing in itself (Ding an rich). In the Critique of Pure Raison (1781), Kant argues that the empirical world available to our senses is merely a world of phenomena, while the true essence of things, the things in themselves, remains beyond our perception. In The World as Will and Representation (1818/1844), Schopenhauer retains this distinction, translating it into his own terms—thus Kant’s phenomenon becomes Schopenhauer’s representation (Vorstellung) While Kant’s thing in itself is identi?ed by Schopenhauer as will(Wille). So the world as we experience it is a world of representations, one step removed from the world of the will, which is the essence of being. If we now relate this to the discussion of art, it is clear that representational art can only imitate the world we perceive and so provide representations of representations, which are then so to speak two steps removed from the ultimate reality of the will. Music, however, since it is a non-representational art, completely bypasses the world of representation and offers us direct unmediated access to the will. In philosophical terms, it is thus by far the most important of the arts. This view of the philosophical signi?cance of music relative to the other arts informs the writings of both Wagner and Nietzsche and is essential to an understanding of Nietzsche‘s view of tragedy, where Schopenhauer’s notions of the phenomenon and of will are associated with the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses respectively.Contemporary developments in music do not provide the sole aesthetic context for the notions of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. In spite of the absence of any explicit link. It seems clear that the opposition between Apollonian ant Dionysian echoes the eighteenth-century distinction between the beautiful(das Sch?ne) and the sublime (das Erhabene), as ?rst proposed by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of pure Ideas of the Sublime and the beautiful(1756) and later elaborated by Kant in the Critique of Judgement (1790). In opposition to the ?nite and symmetrical nature of the beautiful, whose experience elicits pleasure in the viewer, the sublime induces fear through its lack of limits and recognizable form This contrast between form and formlessness constitutes one of the keys t0 the relationship between the Apollonian and Dionysian as de?ned by Nietzsche, and in some respects the Dionysian might even be described as a radicalized version of the sublime,Perhaps the most explicit context for Nietzsche‘s early work however, is that of German attitudes to the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. Nietzsche was by training and profession a classicist. but he was just as in?uenced by the artistic as by the academic uses to which the classical past was put, In general, these uses were twofold—either the classical past could be used to justify and reinforce the present culture by suggesting an identity and continuity between past and present, or the past could be used to criticize the present by stressing the difference and distance between them. Something of the former approach can be seen in the neo-classical architecture of Karl Friedrich Schinkel which in the early nineteenth century helped to give monumental form to the growing political power of post-Napoleonic Prussia and thus to prepare Berlin for its ultimate role as imperial capital after uni?cation. The Doric revival in architecture, with its emphasis on the earliest and supposedly purest artistic forms, coincided with the theories of the Classicist Karl Otfried Müller, who argued that the Durians were ethnically different from the other Greek tribes and were in fact of northern Germanic origin, thus providing a ?attering precedent for the Prussian sure. In contrast to this appropriation of the past for the purposes of aggrandizing the present, there existed in parallel the literary tradition of German Hellenism.

尼采知道什么是哲学，而这种知道是稀罕的。唯有伟大的思想家才拥有这种知道。　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 ——海德格尔　　尼采是一个启示。我是满怀激情地读他的书，并改变了我的生活。　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 ——福　柯　　老子与尼采的相同之处，是他们两人同是反抗有神论的宗教思想，同是反抗藩篱个性的继成道德，同是以个人为本位而力求积极的发展。　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 ——郭沫若

ATTEMPT AT A SELF-CRITICISM1Whatever may lie at the bottom of this questionable book: it must have been a question of the greatest interest and appeal, as well as a deeply personal question—as witnessed by the time in which it was written, In Spite of which it was written, the exciting time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1. While the thunder of the battle of W?rth died away over Europe, the exasperated friend of perplexing puzzles who “as to father this hook sat in some corner or other of the Alps, very perplexed and puzzled, at once very careworn and carefree, and wrote down his thoughts on the Greeks—the core of this wonderful and dif?cult book to which this belated foreword (or afterword) is to he added. Some weeks later: he found himself beneath the walls of Metz, still pursued by the question marks which he had added to the alleged ‘serenity’* of the Greeks and of Greek art; until ?nally in that month of the greatest tension, as peace was being negotiated in Versailles,* he made his peace with himself and, during a slow convalescence from an illness brought home from the ?eld of battle, completed the de?nitive version of the ‘Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music’.—From music? Music and tragedy? The Greeks and the music of tragedy? The Greeks and the pessimistic work of art? The most accomplished, most beautiful, most envied type of men so far, the most persuasive of life’s seductions, the Greeks —what? they were the very people who needed tragedy? Even more—art? To what end—Greek art? …One may surmise where all this places the great question mark of the value of existence Is pessimism necessarily the sign of decline, decay, of the failure of the exhausted and weakened instincts?—Is it was for the Indians,* as it is to all appearances for us ‘modern’ men and Europeans? is there such a thing as a strong pessimism? An intellectual preference for the hard, horri?c, evil, problematic aspects of existence which stems from well-being, from overflowing health, from an abundance of existence? Might it even be possible to suffer from this over-abundance? A tempting courage of the most intense gaze, which yearns for the fearful as for the enemy, the worthy enemy, 0n whom it can test it strength? from whom it wants to learn what ‘fear’* is? What is the meaning, for the Greeks of the best, strongest, bravest period in particular, of the tragic myth? Ant of the tremendous phenomenon of the Dionysian? What, tragedy born of that? —And on the other hand: that which killed tragedy, the Socratism* of morality, the dialectic, the modesty and serenity of the theoretical man—what? might this very Socratism itself not be it sign of decline, of exhaustion, of ailing health, of the anarchic dissolution of the instincts? So the ‘Greek serenity’ of the late Hellenic period would be nothing more than a sunset? The l‘Epicurean* will against pessimism only a precaution on the part of the suffering man? And science itself, our science—yes, what is the meaning of all science anyway, viewed as a symptom of life? To what end, even worse, from what source—does all science proceed? What? Is the scienti?c approach perhaps only a fear and an evasion of pessimism? A re?ned means of self-defence against—the truth? And, in moral term, something like faint-heartedness and falsehood? In amoral terms, a sly move? O Socrates, Socrates, might this have been your secret? O most secret ironist, might this have been your—irony?— 2What I began to grapple with at that time was something fearful and dangerous, a problem with horns, not necessarily a bull exactly, but in any case a new problem: today I would call it the problem of science itself—science grasped for the ?rst time as problematic, as questionable. But the book in which my youthful courage and suspicion found expression at that time—what an impossible book had to grow out of a task so uncongenial to youth! Constructed from nothing but precocious and under-ripe personal experiences, all of which bordered on the inexpressible, and erected on the ground of art—since the problem of science cannot he recognized on its own ground—it is a hook perhaps for artists with an inclination to retrospection and analysis (that is, for an exceptional kind of artist, who is not easy to ?nd and whom one would not Care to seek out . . .), full of psychological innovations and artistic furtiveness, with a background of artistic metaphysics, a youthful work full of the exuberance and melancholy of youth, independent, de?antly Self-reliant even where it seems to defer to an authority and personal reverence, in short a ?rst work also in the had sense of the term, a work af?icted, in spite of the ancient nature of its problem, with the pen of youth, above all with its ‘excessive length’, its ‘Storm and Stress’:* on the other hand, with respect to the success it enjoyed (particularly with the great artist to whom it was addressed as in a dialogue, Richard Wagner*), a book witch has proven itself, I mean one which has in any ease measured up to the ‘best of its time’.*As a result, it should he handled with some consideration and discretion; nevertheless, I have no desire to suppress entirely how disagreeable it appears to me now, how unfamiliar it looks to me now after sixteen years to—an older eye, an eye grown a hundred times more discriminating, hut an eye grown no colder, no less familiar with the audacious task ?rst undertaken by this daring book—that of viewing science through the optic of the artist, and art through the optic of life. . . 3To say it once again, today I ?nd it an impossible book—l ?nd it badly written, clumsy, embarrassing, furious and frenzied in its imagery, emotional, in places saccharine to an effeminate degree, uneven in pace, lacking in a will to logical hygiene,* a book of such utter conviction as to disdain proof, and even to doubt the propriety of proof as such, a book fur initiates, ‘music’ for such as are baptized in music, for those who are from the very beginning bound together in a strange shared experience of art, a password by means of which blood relations in artibus* can recognize one another—an arrogant and infatuated book which from the outset sought to exclude the profanum vulgus* of the ‘educated’ even more than the ‘people’, but which, as its in?uence proved and continues to prove, must be capable enough of seeking out its fellow infatuated enthusiasts and of luring them in a dance along new secret paths. What found expression here in any case—and this was conceded With as much curiosity as aversion —was an unfamiliar voice, the disciple of a still ‘unknown god’,* who concealed himself under the cap of the scholar the ponderousness and dialectical ill humour of the German. and even under the bad manners of the Wagnerian; what was encountered here was a spirit with unfamiliar needs, as yet unnamed, it memory of bursting with questions, experiences, hidden reaches, to which the name Dionysus* was added as another question mark; what spoke here—as one remarked suspiciously—resembled the soul of a mystic or a Maenad* almost, stammering as it were randomly and with great effort in an unfamiliar tongue, almost uncertain whether to communicate or conceal itself. It should have sung, this ‘new soul’—rather than spoken!* What a pity that I did not dare to say what I had to say then as a poet: I might have managed it! Or at least as a philologist:*—even today; almost everything has yet to be discovered and excavated by the philologist! Above all, the problem that here is a problem here—and that the Greeks, as long as we have to answer to the question ‘what is Dionysian?’ still remain completely unknown and unimaginable. . . 4Yes, what is Dionysian? —This book provides an answer —‘a man who knows‘ speaks in it, the initiate and disciple of his gods Nowadays, perhaps, I would choose my words more carefully and speak less eloquently about such a difficult psychological question as the origin of tragedy among the Greeks. A fundamental question is the Greek’s relationship to pain, his degree of sensitivity —does this relationship remain constant?