Romanticism and The Birth of Tragedy

Abstract

Nietzsche characterized his first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), in the Attempt at a Self-Criticism (1886) that he later added to it, as a Romantic work. This chapter argues that characterization should be taken seriously. For even beyond the features of the book that are clearly uppermost in his mind when he advances it, such as its “artists’ metaphysics” and its sympathy with Christianity, a whole set of further fundamental philosophical ideas in the work also come from German Romanticism, including, for example, Nietzsche’s understanding of it as a synthesis of philosophy, science, and art (a “centaur” as he called it). Moreover, the work’s detailed interpretation of ancient tragedy likewise turns out to be profoundly indebted to German Romanticism, specifically to a deep re-thinking of the nature of genres in general and of ancient tragedy in particular that had already been undertaken by the Pre-Romantic Herder and the leading Romantics Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel.