ABSTRACT
If Adorno’s critical philosophy of music includes phenomenological elements that scholars have tended to disregard, the same claim may be argued in Nietzsche’s case. 1 Indeed, The Birth of Tragedy is methodologically conceived as a phenomenology, in the sense in which Nietzsche understands “aesthetics.” Hence the “science of aesthetics,” 2 as Nietzsche expresses his project in his first book, is the theory of specifically sensible, felt phenomena. In this fashion, we may trace Nietzsche’s “reduction” of conventional assumptions regarding the history of the tragic art form, as well as the history and function of the tragic chorus as a musically poetic performance that can only be understood, so Nietzsche argued, in the total context, that is, political and social and religious, of the life-world of Greek antiquity. Apart from such a phenomenological reading, it can be difficult to understand the critical importance of Nietzsche’s counter-arguments regarding the chorus with regard to the “working” dynamic of tragic work of art which Nietzsche famously understands as coming to birth “out of the spirit of music.” Similarly phenomenological, we might argue, are Nietzsche’s genealogical (here we might say genetic) reflections in his Untimely Meditations (ranging from religion, history, education, culture, and politics, and including, well beyond Wagner, his own contemporary musical cultural world), in addition to his critical reflections on logic, perception, and indeed science, just as Nietzsche claims he is the “first” to raise the question of science as such—and here, with respect to the question of science per se, we should think of Heidegger’s but also of Husserl’s philosophies of science—as a question that is specifically “question-worthy.” 3 We have already noted Nietzsche’s most “scientific” or scholarly discovery regarding the prosody or musical intonation of ancient Greek, 4 a discovery that also served as the basis for a very literal emphasis on the importance of “music” in The Birth of Tragedy. To say that this “discovery” of the “music” in the language of ancient Greek was Nietzsche’s discovery does not mean that everyone adverts to this today. On the contrary, Nietzsche’s discoveries tend not to be denied by today’s classical philologists writing on Greek prosody so much as they are simply taken up and assumed, their origination and significance in Nietzsche’s specific context completely forgotten. Nor does it mean that Nietzsche’s then-contemporaries grasped or “heard” what he said—be it in his inaugural lecture as a newly appointed professor of classics in Basel, with all of its relevance for the parallels between the stylistic methods of philological discovery and those of natural scientific discovery, 5 or else in The Birth of Tragedy—no more so than today, especially perhaps in the case of classics scholars. Hence it is not without reason that we find his Zarathustra seemingly compelled to cry out in frustration: “They do not understand me; I am not the mouth for these ears. Must one smash their ears before they learn to listen with their eyes?” 6 So little was he heard that Nietzsche found himself compelled to offer a first reprise of the claims of his first book ten years later in The Gay Science, recalling his initial denigration of Aristotle’s telic theory of tragic catharsis in The Birth of Tragedy, clarifying that what had been at stake in antiquity was anything but an “attempt to overwhelm the spectator with emotion. The Athenian went to the theater in order to hear beautiful speeches. And beautiful speeches were what concerned Sophocles: pardon this heresy!” 7 The problem perhaps endemic to heretical arguments contra the received view in any field is that ones’ contemporaries, rather than hearing or even engaging the argument, tend instead to fall right back to idolatry, in this case, the idolization of Aristotle—and that on the basis of inertia, not argument.
