NIETZSCHE’S THEORY OF TRAGEDY

Abstract

The paper explores Nietzsche’s understanding of (Hellenic) tragedy and the tragic. Nietzsche considered tragedy to be the highest achievement of Hellenic culture, through which this people became aware of itself and its ultimate possibilities, but tragedy for him had exceptional value only as the embodiment of a special form of knowledge where the tragic does not have a purely human, but primarily a cosmic dimension. The first conception of Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy, marked by the discovery of the opposition of artistic impulses symbolizing dream and drunkenness (Apollonian and Dionysian), arose in the early creative phase and was presented in Schopenhauer’s metaphysical vocabulary, unsuitable, it will turn out, to encompass the entire range of iconoclastic premonitions that possessed the young thinker. In the middle and late phase, along with Nietzsche’s philosophical independence and the formation of his own language, another conception, anti-metaphysical, with the will to power as a guiding and organizing principle, slowly matured and took shape. There was no longer a division between the force that creates and the force that destroys; the opposite duality of dream and drunkenness was abolished, and the Dionysian was set as the supreme principle of art and life. The previous criticism of Nietzsche’s understanding of tragedy and the tragic mainly referred to the first conception, underestimating or neglecting the second. The paper develops the hypothesis that for a correct understanding and fair assessment of Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy, it is necessary to approach both conceptions with equal attention, as parts of an integral vision of tragedy and the tragic, and that the second conception in particular requires a new critical reading devoid of non-artistic and non-philosophical motives.