ABSTRACT
In 1872, Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, which effectively ruined his professional reputation in classical philology. Not content simply to solve academic puzzles, Nietzsche looked at the role of tragedy in Greek culture with an eye to the condition of German culture at the present. Dedicated to his friend, the German composer Richard Wagner, the book clearly implies that if “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified” (BT: 5), then it is only Wagner’s music that might justify the world of the present, a world too suffused with the Socratic rationalism against which the book’s argument is mainly directed. Such polemical aims, in a work of scholarship, did not please his academic peers. Fourteen years later, he himself called the book “badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, in places saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof. . . .” (BT Attempt: 3). The reviews at the time were not much more favorable,2 though subsequent scholarship has actually vindicated Nietzsche on both certain broad themes,
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Nietzsche’s subsequent work abandoned even the pretense of aiming for an academic audience of classicists, and turned to the central cultural and philosophical issues about which he cared most deeply.
