Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy: Euripides and Socrates
the “third noble response” to the problem of life, going beyond the Apollonian and Dionysian
(this essay was previously published in Practical Rationality)
Some time back, spurred to do a bit of writing about Friedrich Nietzsche’s early work The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, I began exploring two of the central concepts of that work: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. I’ve often been struck by how often readers have reduced that book to merely those two concepts, or, more accurately, those two responses to the problem of existence.
There is, however much more to The Birth of Tragedy than just this dichotomy of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. First off, while both of these responses are primordial (the Dionysian arguably more so, at least originally), both also do develop, articulate themselves, and assume new determinate forms historically, through the developmental processes of culture. This dynamic assumes particular importance in the case of the Greeks, in whose culture these two responses express themselves through a variety of artistic genres, including epic and lyric poetry, music, dance, sculpture, and drama.
In Nietzsche’s view, the unstable but productive fusion of Dionysian and Apollonian in Greek tragedy, found within the masterworks of Aeschylus and Sophocles, develops into something novel, unique, and needful for humanity. But, there remains still another response discussed in his work, one that in the narrative Nietzsche sets out, supplants and submerges both of the other two earlier responses. He identifies this novel response first with the playwright Euripides, but will more consistently term it the “Socratic” or “Alexandrian” throughout the Birth of Tragedy
Three Fundamental Responses
This is a point on which many over-simplistic interpretations of this great and daring work have gone astray. They rightly see how central Nietzsche’s generally opposed categories of Apollonian and Dionysian are in the work, and they may even realize that the greatness of tragedy resides in reconciling them with each other, permitting them to draw upon the strengths offered by the other. But they miss something just as vital, just as central. And by sticking with a dualism of Dionysian and Apollonian, they miss of the most main points of The Birth of Tragedy.
Nietzsche narrates a tale that extends up to and (in hope at least) beyond his own present time. And, in that account, tragedy died and now waits to be reborn, perhaps. . . This is certainly not something one can simply count on; rather, it is a prospect, a task to be accomplished.
Likewise, the complex and productive interplay between Apollonian and Dionysian as opposites long ago disappeared. Those categories can still be used, and of course are even occasionally embodied or (in the case of the Dionysian) break out. But, they were replaced (even covered over) by what Nietzsche calls the third noble response to the problem of life which successfully chokes them out: the Socratic-Alexandrian.
It should be pointed out that in introducing this third term, Nietzsche does not narrow the gamut of possible responses to the problem of life (responses in terms of culture, art, but also social organization, orderings of values) to an expanded list of three. These are the three better, higher, more noble responses. They are certainly not the only ones possible or available.
Nietzsche sets them all side by side in this passage:
In age after age the same phenomenon recurs. Over and over the avid will finds means to maintain and perpetuate its creatures in life by spreading over existence the blandishments of illusion. One man is enthralled by the Socratic zest for knowledge and is persuaded that he can staunch the eternal wound of being with its help. Another is beguiled by the veil of art which flutters, tantalizing, before his eyes. Yet another is buoyed up by the metaphysical solace that life flows on, indestructible, beneath the whirlpool of appearances. . . . The three kinds of illusion I have named answer only to noble natures, who resent the burden of existence more deeply than the rest and who therefore require special beguilements to make them forget this burden.
Nietzsche also mentions “even commoner and more powerful illusions which the will hold in readiness at any moment”. These are sorts of illusion, responses presumably not answering to “noble natures” but rather to the common people, the many, the herd. He doesn’t expand on that theme in this work, but does suggest that some of these share an affinity with, or derive as it were by echo from, the Socratic-Alexandrian, and cautions:
One thing should be remembered: Alexandrian culture requires a slave class for its continued existence, but in its optimism it denies the necessity for such a class; therefore it courts disaster once the effects of its nice slogans concerning the dignity of man and the dignity of labor have worn thin. Nothing can be more terrible than a barbaric slave class that has learned to view its existence as an injustice and prepares to avenge not only its own wrongs but those of all past generations.
This might constitute another — in Nietzsche’s view — necessarily more plebeian, response or set of responses. His scope and aim in the Birth of Tragedy is clearly not to explore all of the possible perspectives or manners of moral life. This is a project that gets carried out in other, later, arguably more mature works, like Beyond Good and Evil or On the Genealogy of Morals.
Socrates does typify something new on the human scene, something in some sense noble, or at least powerful, capable of asserting, imposing, dominating. Nietzsche realizes and reckons that Socrates is not “merely an agent of disintegration,” a falling-back from the cultural progress already made in Greece. While granting “an anti-Dionysian tendency antedating Socrates, its most brilliant exponent,” matters come to a crisis in Socrates, who Nietzsche asserts we ought to see “as the vortex and turning point of Western civilization.”
Dionysos had already been driven from the tragic stage by a daemonic power speaking through Euripides. For in a certain sense Euripides was but a mask, while the divinity which spoke through him was neither Dionysos nor Apollo but a brand new daemon calls Socrates.
Nietzsche continues:
Thenceforth the real antagonism was to be between the Dionysian spirit and the Socratic, and tragedy was to perish in the conflict.
So, how did this occur? By what processes? And with what effects? In the next following sections, we’ll examine three themes, in the working out of which Nietzsche answers these questions.
Euripides and Socrates as Spectators
In Nietzsche’s history, tragedy does not succumb to some outside force. It is not overcome in competition by some other literary or performative genre — the New Comedy, say, or the Platonic Dialogue. Rather, it is one of tragedy’s own workers and reformers, Euripides, who undoes it, who dissects it and deals it a death blow, from within.
Greek tragedy perished in a manner quite different from the older sister arts: it died by suicide, in consequence of an insoluble conflict, while the others died serene and natural deaths at advanced ages.
When after all a new genre sprang into being which honored tragedy as its parent, the child was seen with dismay to bear indeed the features of its mother, but of its mother during her death struggle. The death struggle of tragedy had been fought by Euripides, while the latter art is known as the New Attic comedy. Tragedy lived on there in a degenerate form, a monument to its painful and laborious death.
Why would Euripides do this, you might ask? At the apex of a long process of developing and deepening interaction, even integration between the two great cultural forces, the Dionysian and the Apollonian, why ruin such a good thing? According to Nietzsche, Euripides’ decisions as a playwright were dictated by the demands of two main spectators he had in mind.
Interestingly, and reinforcing the his insistence that this response is not merely a vulgar, common one, neither of these two main spectators are the common man, the crowd, the hoi polloi. Euripides does place more common characters up on the stage, allowing the audience to see themselves mirrored there, to be sure. But he does not take his cues from them. Instead, the situation is the reverse.
One of these important spectators, in an interesting twist, turns out to be Euripides himself, but as Nietzsche says, “the thinker Euripides, not the poet”:
Endowed with such talent, such remarkable intellectual lucidity and versatility, Euripides watched the performances of his predecessor’s plays and tried to rediscover in them the fine lineaments which age, as happens in the case of old paintings, had darkened and almost obliterated. And now something occurred which cannot surprise those among us who are familiar with the deeper secrets of Aeschylean tragedy. Euripides perceived in every line, in every trait, something quite incommensurable: a certain deceptive clarity and, together with it, a mysterious depth, an infinite background.
This presents a pressing problem for the newer playwright:
Euripides sat in the theater, pondering, a troubled spectator. In the end he had to admit to himself that he did not understand his great predecessors. But since he looked upon reason as the fountainhead of all doing and enjoying, he had to find out whether anybody shared these notions of his, or whether he was alone in facing up to such incommensurable features.
The ordinary person, a mere member of the multitude, can give him no assurance, whether affirming or denying. On these matters, the older tragedians (as well as all the other poets) remain silent. What about the wise people of the time? The wandering Sophists, the early historians, the pre-Socratic philosophers, would any of them have been of assistance to Euripides in answering the questions pressing upon him?
There was one person who could be an ally, even a guide and master:
In this tormented state of mind, Euripides discovered his second spectator — one who did not understand tragedy and for that reason spurned it. Allied with him he could risk coming out of his isolation to fight that tremendous battle against the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles; not by means of polemics, but as a tragic poet determined to make his notion of tragedy prevail over the traditional notions.
Who was this fellow traveler, the second spectator to whose judgement Euripides would appeal? It was Socrates, the philosopher who sets that very discipline of philosophy on a new basis and trajectory — and whose views, whose will-to-knowledge, possessed such immense implications for art, poetry, and specifically tragedy:
It was Socrates who expressed most clearly this radically new prestige of knowledge and conscious intelligence when he claimed to be the only one who acknowledged that he knew nothing. . . . From this point of view, Socrates was forced to condemn both the prevailing art and the prevailing ethics. Wherever his penetrating gaze fell he saw nothing but lack of understanding, fictions rampant, and so was led to deduce a state of affairs wholly discreditable and perverse. Socrates believed that it was his mission to correct the situation.
Nietzsche sees this assertion or assumption of an agency going far beyond anything that had been thought of (except at the heights of hubris and folly) as essential to the new Socratic approach, which takes on and takes shape in vast new projects, projected beyond and carried out by multiple generations. Nietzsche writes of this as a new kind of illusion:
that thought, guided by the thread of causation, might plumb the farthest depths of being and even correct it. This grand metaphysical illusion has become integral to the scientific endeavor and again and again leads science to those far limits of its inquiry where it becomes art — which is this mechanism, is what is really intended.
The New Socratic Orientation to Life
Socrates, the “mystagogue of science,” becomes through his own defiance and death a kind of exemplar or ideal, inspiring “generation after generation of inquirers, spurred by an insatiable thirst for knowledge,” spreading “a common net of knowledge. . . over the whole globe”
[T]he image of the dying Socrates — mortal man freed by knowledge and argument from the fear of death — is the emblem which, hanging above the portal of every science, reminds the adept that his mission is to make existence appear intelligible and thereby justified.
Nietzsche writes of “the gigantic driving wheel of logical Socratism,” evident in the portrait drawn of him in Plato’s dialogues, “turning, as it were, behind Socrates.” Why? Because he represents:
the prototype of an entirely new mode of existence. He is the great exemplar of that theoretical man whose significance and aims we must now attempt to understand.
One trait of this new type is a change in the direction of human desire, that embodied in a sort of critic Nietzsche calls “theoretical man”
Like the artist, theoretical man takes infinite pleasure in all that exists. . . but while the artist, having unveiled the truth garment by garment, remains with us gaze fixed on what is still hidden, theoretical man takes delight in the cast garments and finds his highest satisfaction in the unveiling process itself, which proves to him his own power.
Another trait, just as essential, is an optimism, aggressively pressing forward, confident in its assumptions, hoping to find these verified in its onward march into. . . everything. What are these assumptions? What effects do they have, both in the person making them and in the world, the culture, into which they penetrate?
Consider the consequences of the Socratic maxims: “Virtue is knowledge; all sins arise from ignorance; only the virtuous are happy” — these three basic formulations of optimism spell the death of tragedy. The virtuous hero must henceforth be a dialectician; virtue and knowledge, belief and ethics, be necessarily and demonstrably connected
This change of ideals is reduplicated, not weakening like an echo, but waxing like feedback:
[E]ver since Socrates the mechanism of concepts, judgements and syllogisms has come to regarded as the highest exercise of man’s powers, nature’s most admirable gift. Socrates and his successors, down to our own day, have considered all moral and sentimental accomplishments — noble deeds, compassion, self-sacrifice, heroism, even that spiritual calm which the Apollonian Greek called sophrosune — to be ultimately derived from the dialectic of knowledge, and therefore teachable.
The Socratic-Alexandrian response does not produce, and indeed cannot help but misunderstand, that serenity or spiritual calm associated with the Apollonian. It produces and provides only “cheerfulness” in its place, an attitude which:
opposes Dionysian wisdom and art; tries to dissolve the power of myth; puts in place of a metaphysical comfort a terrestrial consonance. . . . It believes that the whole world can be corrected through knowledge and that life should be guided by science; that it is actually in a position to confine man within the narrow circle of soluble tasks, where he can say cheerfully to life: “I want you. You are worth knowing.”
What Happened to Tragedy
This third, Socratic-Alexandrian response turns against the Dionysian. It attempt to drive it out as something merely irrational, a primitive element and aspect. It aims to deprive the Dionysian of all mystery. In some sense, the Socratic might be seen as a mutation stemming originally from the Apollonian impulse to impose form, to bring clarity, to contribute consolation and serenity through the interplay of images.
Even if that origin might have been the case , however, the Socratic exceeds so far, unchecked, beyond the limits self-imposed and observed by the Apollonian, that it rapidly loses any resemblance to it. As Nietzsche cautions: once you turn against and cast out Dionysus, Apollo will abandon you. What do you have left then?
There are really three answers to this question which Nietzsche provides — three new artistic genres he identifies — though he does not set these out side by side so much as focus on the first and discuss the other two in passing: Euripidean Tragedy, New Comedy, and Platonic Dialogue.
Earlier tragedy fused together a number of Apollonian and Dionysian elements or aspects, some of them structural, others matters of impulse, identification, or orientation. These are not simply lost, but transformed, their depths gutted from them, in the drama of Euripides.
Here there is no longer any trace of epic self-forgetfulness, of the true rhapsodist’s cool detachment. . . Euripides is the actor of the beating heart, with hair standing on end. . . The Euripidean drama is at the same time cool and fiery, able alike to freeze and consume us. It cannot possibly achieve the Apollonian effects of the Epic, while on the other hand it has severed all connections with the Dionysian mode, so that in order to have any impact at all it must seek out novel stimulants which are to be found neither in the Apollonian nor in the Dionysian realm.
Again, we see that something novel, something beyond, additional, arises, and takes the place of the other, older responses. What are these new stimulants?
on the one hand, cold paradoxical ideas put in the place of Apollonian contemplation, and on the other fiery emotions put in the place of Dionysian transports.
Nietzsche explains these transformations in terms ostensibly about Plato’s dialogues, but applying just as well to Euripides’ tragedies:
It is at this point that philosophical ideas begin to entwine themselves about art, forcing the latter to cling closely to the trunk of dialectic. The Apollonian tendency now appears as logical schematicism, just as we found in the case of Euripides a corresponding translation of the Dionysian affect into a naturalistic one.
There is another parallel to Platonic dialogues as well:
Socrates, the dialectical hero of the Platonic drama, shows a close affinity to the Euripidean hero, who is compelled to justify his actions by proof and counterproof.
The Platonic dialogue, Nietzsche seems to suggest, is the product of another poet who under the Socratic spell, finds himself compelled to turn against poetry, or at the least to rethink and remake it.
[Plato’s] creative gifts forced him to develop an art form deeply akin to the existing forms which he had repudiated.
This affinity — even though hostile to imitation, mimesis — is displayed particularly in one feature which, for me, indicates the genius and greatness of Plato.
Tragedy had assimilated to itself all the older poetic genres. In a somewhat eccentric sense the same thing can be claimed for the Platonic dialogue, which was a mixture of all the available styles and forms and hovered between narrative, lyric, drama, between prose and poetry, once again breaking through the old law of stylistic unity.
Dialogues like the Symposium and the Phaedrus, in which Plato deliberately replicates varied styles and genres come to mind immediately as examples of what Nietzsche has in mind. But one this genre-integrating (and often, ironically mocking) feature runs throughout Plato’s entire body of work. Nietzsche grudgingly admits: “the Platonic dialogue was the lifeboat in which the shipwrecked older poetry saved itself, together with its numerous offspring,” and he credits Plato with “provid[ing] for all posterity the pattern of a new art form, the novel.”
This is a good place to leave off, on a conciliatory note, without discussing or even citing Nietzsche’s scornful assessments of the banality of New Comedy, which I’ll examine and discuss in the next post in this series.
I’ll just throw out one idea to mull over: Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy is not intended as a merely historical dissertation. In his view, a critical opening was taking place in his own era of modernity, a disruption of the Socratic-Alexandrian, scientific, optimistic spirit’s predominance and confidence, and an opening to some new resurgence, restoration, and reconfiguration of the Dionysian and Apollonian.
Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.