Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy

Abstract

The Birth of Tragedy was one of the last and most distinguished contributions to a Central European debate about the ills of modern society. The argument in the Friedrich Nietzsche's text falls into roughly three parts. The first part describes the origin of tragedy in ancient Greece as the outcome of a struggle between two forces, principles, or drives. The second part of Nietzsche's text describes how the balance is upset by the arrival of a new force, principle, or drive, which Nietzsche associated with Socrates. The final part of the text describes the modern state of crisis in which they are being forced to realize the limits of the Socratic culture and the high price they have had to pay for it. As Nietzsche himself points out in the introduction to the second edition, The Birth of Tragedy is a work of Romanticism.