Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy: Euripides and Socrates

The “third noble response” to the problem of life, going beyond the Apollonian and Dionysian

Some time back, spurred to do a bit of writing about Friedrich Nietzsche’s early work — The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music , I began exploring two of the central concepts of that work — the Apollonian and the Dionysian. I’ve often been struck by how often readers have reduced that book to merely those two concepts — or, more accurately, those two responses to the problem of existence.

There is, however much more to The Birth of Tragedy than just this dichotomy of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. First off, while both of these responses are primordial (the Dionysian arguably more so, at least originally), both also do develop, articulate themselves, and assume new determinate forms historically, through the developmental processes of culture. This dynamic assumes particular importance in the case of the Greeks, in whose culture these two responses express themselves through a variety of artistic genres — epic and lyric poetry, music, dance, sculpture, and drama.

In Nietzsche’s view, the unstable but productive fusion of Dionysian and Apollonian in Greek tragedy — found within the masterworks of Aeschylus and Sophocles — develops into…