Nietzsche on Tragedy

Background

Nietzsche: a nineteenth century Classicist, but also a Philosopher: but one who very much works in the oracular style
Birth of Tragedy originally published in 1872
The question Nietzsche poses: "how to view scholarship from the vantage of the artist and art from the vantage of life" (from the preface)
This was (in N's words!) "an arrogant and extravagant book"

The Birth of Tragedy: Marriage of the Apollonian and the Dionysiac

Apollo	Dionysus
Dream illusion wisdom, delight, beauty of illusion like a day-dream: a set of fantasies under one's control	Intoxication (of wine or more generally a link to primordial, uncontrolled emotions) narcotic: loss of self, a "mystical self-abrogation" uncontrolled fantasies
principium individuationis: principle of "individuation," of divorcing one's SELF from the group, and focusing on self-identity	thiasos: oneness of individual with the group
principle of order, control	uncontrolled, orgiastic rites that without the Apollonian are barbaric (but of course the Greeks have the Apollonian layer that makes this a controlled riot)
CULTURE self-control, counter to hybris Sayings inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi" "nothing in excess" "know thyself" triumphs over monsters and reality through illusion	NATURE primordial emotions loss of self in the thiasos a lack of self-control that makes the Apollonian most august, more awesome when control is returned

Tragedy resolves the fundamental conflict between Apollo and Dionysus: Marriage of the Apollonian and Dionysiac

Dionysiac excitation creates a group identity, associated with the chorus, and by extension with the audience, who identifies with the chorus
ekstasis: the primary dramaticphenomenon is to project oneself outside oneself and then to act as though one had really entered another body, another character

(answers why tragedy is at a festival for Dionysus)
(literally true for actor: but also, in a transformed way, for audience?)

p. 56f: "What we have here is the individual effacing himself through entering a strange being. It should be made clear that this phenomenon is not singular but epidemic: a whole crowd becomes rapt in this manner."
But the Dionysiac is overlaid, and controlled, by the Apollonian structure of poetry and dramatic illusion: these emotions are not, finally, a loss into the primordial, a total loss of self, but are simply a part of the dramatic experience

Tragedy is then a Dionysiac chorus (actors, chorus, and audience!) which "discharges itself in Apollonian images"

Apollo = poetry, dramatic scene, i.e. controlled expressions (of the "dream illusion")
Dionysus = chorus, audience (thiasos!): an empathic, ecstatic responsion

Importantly, N. adds to the discussion how it may be that the watching of dramatic suffering is not simply an individual experience, but one informed fundamentally by the group dynamics

Dionysiac thiasos: one measure's one's own reactions by those of the group, and this informs, to an extent the emotion that we feel
But this happens with the context of Apollonian control: so the connection with these group emotions, though primordial, "ecstatic", and potentially orgiastic, are in fact controlled by the beautiful order of the artistic structure, that "dream illusion" we call drama

Terms to know:

"Apollonian" as N. uses the term

"Dionysiac" as N. uses the term

ekstasis (see under "Bacchae")

thiasos