The Birth of Tragedy - 1 - The Apolline and the Dionysiac

Part OneQuoteThe most accomplished, most beautiful, most universally envied race of mankind, those most capable of seducing us into life — [the Greeks] were the ones who needed tragedy? Or even more — art? What for? Notes🔥 Nietzsche begins the second edition of The Birth of Tragedy with a kind of preface called "An Attempt at Self-Criticism." He seems mystified by his book and by the fact that it finds readers who are interested in it. 🔥 He draws a correlation between the height of tragedy with the height of the Greeks, and with the decline of tragedy with their decline, and wonders if tragedy was a healthy way of integrating madness. 🔥 He also leads to questions about morality and sees it as anti-life. Life is amoral, so morality is anti-life. Christianity, in particular, is a perpetrator of this, inventing an idealized world in heaven so they can deny and despise this life. Therefore, he says, this instinct for life and art are against morality and Christianity, even going so far as…