Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy and
Other Writings (Cambridge Texts in
the History of Philosophy) by
Friedrich Nietzsche
Greeks, Those Who Made Life Seem Most Seductive...
The Birth of Tragedy is one of the seminal philosophical works of the
modern period. The theories developed in this relatively short text have
had a profound influence on the philosophy, literature, music and politics of
the twentieth century. This edition presents a new translation by Ronald
Speirs and an introduction by Raymond Geuss that sets the work in its
historical and philosophical context. The volume also includes two essays
on related topics that Nietzsche wrote during the same period.
Personal Review: Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy and Other
Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy) by
Friedrich Nietzsche

Although I'd spent some time reading Nietzsche somewhat intensively, I'm
far from being a "student of Nietzsche," let alone a "Nietzsche scholar." My
reading of him was more as a disturbed soul than as a student/scholar,
and I didn't get much in the way of philosophical achievement of his. One
of my plans for the summer is to read him more carefully and more with an
eye to his intellectual development, and I began with The Birth of Tragedy.
So, BT is his first book, published when he was only 27. As he himself
famously noted, 14 years after the first publication of BT, it is "a first book
in every bad sense of the word." Apart from his own criticism (in "Attempt
at a Self-Criticism"), any new reader just entering Nietzsche's corpus and
Nietzsche scholorship is bound to hear of critical belittlements toward BT.
So we hear that Nietzsche of BT is far from the mature philosopher we
admire in Beyond Good and Evil and other later works, that he was under
a strong sway of his youthful influences (Wagner, Schopenhauer) and was
helplessly romantic. That he was a mere "philologist and cultural critic,"
whose philosophical maturing is years to come. That, taken with
Nietzsche's later intellectual developments in mind, it is a "scandalous"
(albeit in a different sense from what his detractors used it on its
publication) book. Etc. Etc.
I'm now into Human, All Too Human, and I cannot but think that what
Richard Schacht says in "Introduction" as to this another llargely ignored
book of Nietzsche's early period equally applies to BT: "Even today, few
recognize it as the gold mine it is, not only as an excellent way of
becoming acquainted with his thinking, but also for its wealth of ideas
worth thinking about." Coarsely put, isn't it often true that the worst work by
the greatest mind often is far superior to the best by the mediocre?
My reading of BT this time concludes: his most pressing concern in BT is
*not* to pay homage to Wagner or Schopenhauer, rather it is to seek ways
to learn from Greeks, for as he notes, "the ability to learn from this people
is in itself a matter of lofty fame and distinguishing rarity." By tracing the
birth and death of tragedy in ancient Greece, Nietzsche is showing us how
a culture could "justify" (affirm and embrace) even the "worst of all worlds,"
and how it perished. His diagnosis of modern ills toward the end of BT is
indeed a goldmine, a wealth of ideas worth exploring, and is so pertinent to
our time.
Perhaps Nietzsche's insights and ideas in BT have been fully explored and
exhausted, and thus we may benefit more from elsewhere in this regard.
Yet, as a beautifully written "youthful" book, belonging to the precious
group of books we may call "books for the eternal youth (in us)," it has the
power to make our heart beat faster, awakening the spirit in us we thought
we have long lost.
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