‘For those who wish to derive only a scholarly satisfaction from the work, I have not made things easy, since when all is said and done I did not take them into account at all. I do not cite my sources.’Footnote ¹ With that blunt but rather understated (and in some degree disingenuous) entry in one of his notebooks from 1872 – far more deadpan in tone than many others of the same period (there is, for instance, a nearby note which equates philologists with castrati …)Footnote ² – Friedrich Nietzsche encapsulates the inescapable provocation of The Birth of Tragedy: a work written by a classical scholar in defiance of the most fundamental norms and protocols of his profession. In the near century-and-a-half since the publication of Nietzsche's first book, so much has changed in classical scholarship (partly, of course, under the influence of forces which Nietzsche himself helped shape) that the original scandal of the work has inevitably faded into the historical middle distance. Indeed, the paradoxical status which Nietzsche himself conceived for his book, with its lack of documentation serving (among other things) as a pointed symbol of resistance to what he took to be the dead weight of institutionalised philological practices, has been ironically reversed by the subjection of The Birth of Tragedy itself to the operations of historical–critical scholarship, including extensive treatment in the scholarly genre par excellence, the commentary.Footnote ³ Scholarship, it might seem, has defeated Nietzsche's attempt to circumvent or even overcome it.

I make no apology (either to Nietzsche or to the reader) for the fact that this paper will add, after a fashion at any rate, to historical–critical scholarship on The Birth of Tragedy. It will do so, however, in a spirit which tries to respect the book's provocative strangeness while nonetheless endeavouring to make sense of its multi-layered texture of thought. Like many readers, I find the work alternately exhilarating and frustrating both in its ideas and in its mode of discourse. A similar ambivalence is captured by the world's leading authority on the Dionysiac in ancient Greek religion, Albert Henrichs, when he says of the work's central polarity of the Apolline and the Dionysian that ‘it is almost irresistible, and yet it must be resisted …’: Henrichs finds the book flawed by elements of ‘sheer fantasy’ and wilful disregard for evidence, yet also valuable for its ‘sublime prose’ and ‘daring vision’.Footnote ⁴ Moreover, the mixed feelings which the book now readily elicits from scholarly readers is arguably an appropriate counterpart to Nietzsche's own conception of it – and of classical scholarship in general – as a ‘centaur’: a combination of ‘art’ and ‘science’, creativity and knowledge.Footnote ⁵ Precisely how, so to speak, the anatomical proportions of the centaur are calibrated by its readers has proved a crucial factor in determining verdicts on the importance of the book. If The Birth of Tragedy represents an intellectual watershed for its author, it can also be seen as an epoch-making symptom of conflicting forces within the values of Classics as a discipline.Footnote ⁶ Grappling with the book remains a significant challenge, therefore, for classicists of various persuasions. I shall attempt to meet the challenge myself by combining close reading (an aspect of philology for which, in a certain sense, Nietzsche always retained a sort of nostalgia)Footnote ⁷ with an interest in a number of those Greek ‘sources’ which the work declines to cite but with which, just beneath the surface, it is tacitly and yet sometimes antagonistically engaged.

The core of my argument will take the form of a sustained scrutiny of what is often described as The Birth of Tragedy’s most important idea.Footnote ⁸ The idea in question, which will turn out (so I shall contend) to be something more than a single claim, is highlighted by Nietzsche himself in his remarkable ‘Attempt at Self-Criticism’, written for a new edition of The Birth of Tragedy in 1886, as the ‘provocative’ or even ‘offensive’ proposition that ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon is the existence of the world justified’ (with Nietzsche's own emphasis here and below).Footnote ⁹ That wording does not, in fact, correspond exactly to either of the two main formulations of the point in the original book, the first of which, in §5, states that ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified’, and the second, in §24, that ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon does existence and the world seem justified’.Footnote ¹⁰ It is no mere pedantry to note those small-looking variations of wording (and emphasis); they will acquire more significance once we take account of other parts of the intricate web of motifs with which they are connected. In the ‘Attempt at Self-Criticism’, Nietzsche links the thought at issue directly to the statement in the work's 1872 ‘Foreword to Wagner’ that art is ‘the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity’ of human life.Footnote ¹¹ In The Birth of Tragedy, ‘art’ and ‘aesthetics’ are mutually dependent concepts,Footnote ¹² so it is legitimate to paraphrase the statement from the ‘Foreword’ as claiming that aesthetic experience is the most important of life-values, and therefore, in some sense (psychologically at least, though not logically), the ultimate justification of life.Footnote ¹³ In those very general terms, there is no doubt about the complexion of the The Birth of Tragedy’s aesthetic philosophy, nor about the status of its notion of an exclusively aesthetic ‘justification’ of the world as a radical anti-theodicy,Footnote ¹⁴ a repudiation of the theologico-ethical foundations of several major world-views, including those of Platonism and Stoicism in antiquity, Christianity and Leibnizian philosophy in more recent times. But it is much easier to say what is being rejected here than what is to replace it, not least because of a recurrent instability between, so to speak, internal and external perspectives, both of them experienced through art but the first of them humanly constructed, the second ‘eternally’ valid (in Nietzsche's piquant appropriation of that adverb from traditional theodicies). The chief aim of this article is to try to clarify the proposal of an aesthetic justification of the world through a careful re-examination of some of the Greek ideas sown into the fabric of the work.

In the opening section of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche famously characterises Apollo as the god of all image-making activities, whether externalised (as in sculpture) or enacted in the mind's inner fantasy world, especially dreaming. He includes prophecy in this same realm, and takes the healing powers of sleep and dreaming to be ‘the symbolic analogue of prophetic skill and in general of the arts through which life is made possible and worth living’.Footnote ¹⁵ Despite the breadth of this formulation, the application to strictly Apolline art is unequivocal. That point matters, as does that fact that, in Nietzsche's evaluative idiom, the vocabulary of making life ‘worth living’ is closely associated with the idea of ‘justifying’ life.Footnote ¹⁶ We need to keep in mind here that, independently of the Apolline–Dionysian polarity, Nietzsche had a permanent attachment to the thought that art existed in order to make life worth living: as early as his Basle inaugural lecture of 1869 he declares, ‘Life is worth living, says art, the most beautiful seductress; life is worth knowing, says science/scholarship (Wissenschaft)’; and similar suggestions can be found in the notebooks as late as 1888.Footnote ¹⁷ So at the start of the argument of The Birth of Tragedy it seems that it is Apolline art which occupies a space Nietzsche elsewhere ascribes to art tout court. It is only as the complications of the Dionysian enter the picture that thoughts of art as making life worth living, and/or providing a justification for existence, become entangled in further qualifications. But it will prove unclear, on my analysis, how far those qualifications modify Nietzsche's most indispensable aesthetic conviction.

The initial identification of art in its Apolline capacity as a fundamental life-value is reinforced and elaborated in §3 of The Birth of Tragedy. We can trace here a telling sequence of ideas which it is worth enumerating concisely for future reference: first, that the Olympian gods (not just Apollo) are a collective ‘deification’ and artistic idealisation of the whole of existence, both good and bad (as opposed to representing morally or spiritually elevated forces); second, that Olympian religion was a means by which the Greeks could ‘overcome’ their Silenic knowledge of the underlying horrors of existence; third, that art (once again, the context strictly requires Apolline art) comes about in order to ‘perfect’ existence and ‘seduce’ us into continuing to live; fourth, that in Olympian religion ‘the gods justify the life of men by living it themselves – the only satisfactory theodicy!’; fifth, that in Homeric epic life itself is desirable and death the only evil, as the famous sentiments of Achilles in the Odyssean underworld affirm.Footnote ¹⁸

The sequence of thought just summarised displays an unmistakable (though often ignored) affinity with Nietzsche's aphoristic statements about the aesthetic justification of existence. The picture is made more difficult, however, by the interweaving of potentially divergent ideas. In particular, there is a tension between two conceptions of Olympian religion: one, which sees it as a magnified projection of all aspects of life, both good and bad; the other, which regards the divine world as one of ideal perfection, even (Nietzsche suggests) a kind of ‘bright sunshine’ radiating a sheer joy in existence. This tension might be thought to reflect a sort of ironic counterpoint (and the irony was drawn out in antiquity itself by the Menippean traditions represented in Lucian's writing)Footnote ¹⁹ between the background and foreground of the religious mythology of Homeric epic, in which the gods can be described programmatically as eternally blessed (μάκαρες) and serene (ῥεῖα ζώοντες), yet also be shown as perpetually drawn to and immersed in a world of conflict which does indeed seem to entail the ‘deification’ of all aspects of experience (with the single exception of mortality itself). Where Nietzsche is concerned, the consequence of this point is a lingering uncertainty about his contention that art ‘makes life possible’. Does Homeric epic do this by projecting a strongly human and non-idealistic form of meaning and value onto the imagined Olympians (as ‘the gods justify the life of men by living it themselves’ seems to suggest), or alternatively, as Nietzsche says in the same breath, by offering to the human gaze ‘a transfiguring mirror’Footnote ²⁰ which helps people live in its illusion of perfection and thereby block out the pessimism which the folk wisdom of Silenus would otherwise whisper to them?

However we try to resolve these uncertainties in §3, where Nietzsche's position is left somewhat suspended between the alternatives just outlined, it is undeniable that the Homeric justification of existence manifests a strictly Apolline capacity of art, a capacity to use seductively beautiful images to make life ‘worth living’. At this stage of the work, no implications are yet visible for Dionysian art – nor, therefore, for tragedy. In this connection, it is a crucial consideration, though one which has rarely received its fair share of attention, that Nietzsche resolutely excludes the notion of Homeric epic itself as a tragic art-form – a notion widely attested in antiquity and implicitly incorporated by Nietzsche's Basle colleague Jacob Burckhardt into his own perspective on Greek pessimism.Footnote ²¹ Because of his interpretation of the Apolline–Dionysian aesthetic dichotomy, Nietzsche commits himself to adopting a one-sided view of epic as a glorification of heroic achievement. He takes epic, in its supposedly Apolline delight in pure semblances, to be intrinsically incapable of achieving a tragic effect, as he will spell out most unambiguously in The Birth of Tragedy §12.Footnote ²² Equally, however, the concept which Nietzsche calls a ‘pessimism of strength’ in the 1886 ‘Attempt at Self-Criticism’,Footnote ²³ and which he ties directly to the work's account of tragedy, is prefigured in §3's view that Homeric epic overcomes and reverses the wisdom of Silenus, suppressing the knowledge of existential horror behind the illusion of Apolline beauty.

But if that is so, a larger question poses itself: if Homer's Apolline art can defeat, or triumph over, unmitigated (‘Silenic’) pessimism, why is that not enough as an aesthetic justification of existence? Why did the Greeks need tragedy at all? Nietzsche's answer, in §4, purports to be not just aesthetic but historical. He supposes that Homeric epic is a kind of ‘naive’ dream-state, with its beautiful glorification of life, which depends on a complete suppression and ‘forgetting’ of the terrible, primordial ground of being, the domain of irremediable contradiction and suffering. This means in turn that, historically speaking, it was possible for a Dionysian awareness of the primordial to irrupt at a certain point into Greek consciousness, to break into what Nietzsche, in a proto-Freudian metaphor, calls the ‘artificially dammed-up world’ of Apolline illusion.Footnote ²⁴ In some sense, then, Apolline art, even in its Homeric form, was not enough for the Greeks. Converting a chronological relationship between poetic genres into an overarching cultural teleology, Nietzsche is driven to saying that archaic Greeks came to recognise in themselves a kind of close relationship to the Dionysian and an overwhelming need to give expression to it. ‘Apollo could not live without Dionysus!’Footnote ²⁵

In scrutinising how Nietzsche's idea of justifying the world as an aesthetic phenomenon unfolds in a complex series of moves, each of them a response to his Greek ‘sources’, I need at this stage to draw attention to a vital Platonic subtext in this same section (4) of The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche here positions art in a conspicuously tripartite metaphysical schema: at its base, the primordial, undifferentiated Will, with all its contradiction and pain; above that, the realm of phenomena or appearances, ‘Erscheinung’, in which our waking lives are entirely enmeshed; and at the top, art qua a ‘semblance of semblance’.Footnote ²⁶ Needless to say, Nietzsche is here adapting Schopenhauerian categories, from which one can construct a related but different tripartition consisting of the Will, representations/phenomena, and Platonic ideas as apprehended in art.Footnote ²⁷ But Nietzsche is also tacitly undertaking a revaluation of Platonic motifs themselves, in particular a combination of the Republic’s Cave analogy with the tripartite metaphysics employed to downgrade the status of mimetic art in book 10 of the same dialogue.

Despite considerable interest in Nietzsche's relationship to Plato more generally, the present point tends to receive scant notice.Footnote ²⁸ It was during the very period when he was working on The Birth of Tragedy that Nietzsche famously described his own philosophy, in a notebook entry from early 1871, as inverted Platonism (‘umgedrehter Platonismus’), whose aim he glossed as living in the realm of appearances.Footnote ²⁹ The metaphysics of BT §4 exemplifies that description. The result, in relation to the relevant parts of the Republic, can be schematically simplified as shown in Table 1, where the right-hand side inverts the hierarchical value-scheme of the left.

Table 1

Nietzsche's inverted Platonism in The Birth of Tragedy.

In both cases, the empirical world of human experience is one of illusory becoming, but whereas in the metaphysical vista opened up by Socrates in the Republic the purpose of philosophy is to escape from illusion towards a knowledge of transcendent truth and value, the direction of Nietzsche's thought is defiantly in the opposite direction: he proposes the doubling and intensification of illusion through art as the only ‘salvation’ or ‘redemption’. One might add that whereas intelligibility on the Platonic scheme of things lies outside the Cave, Nietzsche takes pains to stress that it is dreaming, and therefore art as well, which possesses a special degree of intelligibility.Footnote ³⁰

To accept the thesis that, in an allusive manner highly characteristic of his writing, Nietzsche inverts the metaphysics of both the Cave and the aesthetics of Republic 10, we do not need to resolve the knotty problem of how those two parts of the Republic are themselves related (is mimetic art part of the Cave allegory, as some have thought? or do the arguments of book 10 form a kind of aesthetic supplement to the metaphysics of the dialogue's middle books, as I am more inclined to believe?).Footnote ³¹ The thesis is reinforced by several key details: first, that thoughts of the Cave had already been prompted by BT §1's description of dreaming (on the part, at least, of the artistically sensitive person) as something more than a ‘shadow-play’, a description which should be compared with Socrates’ metaphor of dreaming for existence in the Cave (Rep. 7.520c); second, that Nietzsche's phrase ‘Schein des Scheins’ is close to Socrates’ description in Republic 10 of mimetic art as a ‘mimesis of a phantasm’ (φαντάσματος … μίμησις, 598b), and that the latter is probably the very passage which Nietzsche has in mind when, revealingly, he later (in §14) makes a direct reference to the aesthetics of Republic 10 and takes Plato to treat art as ‘the imitation of an apparition’ (‘Nachahmung eines Scheinbildes’); lastly, that the Cave allegory is powerfully evoked, as we shall see in due course, in §9 of Nietzsche's book.Footnote ³²

If the first three sections of The Birth of Tragedy ground the life-value of (Apolline) art in the seductive beauty of illusion, and if §4 underscores this with its inversion of Platonic metaphysics and aesthetics, our understanding faces a severe challenge when in §5 we reach the first of the two main occurrences of Nietzsche's ‘provocative’ dictum about an aesthetic justification of the world. The thrust of §5 is to contest the prevailing stereotype of lyric poets, including Archilochus (a ‘Dionysian–Apolline genius’, who in that respect anticipates the supposedly unique achievement of tragedy),Footnote ³³ as ‘subjective’ artists. All true artists, Nietzsche insists, must escape from their own individuality and achieve a creative state of pure, will-less, disinterested contemplation (a state, significantly, which Nietzsche elsewhere associates specifically with Apolline art).Footnote ³⁴ In the case of the lyric poet, this starts with a Dionysian and mystical experience, mediated through music, of the primal realm of being, which is then symbolically transmuted into Apolline images of an only ostensibly subjective ‘I’. A number of important details involving Nietzsche's suppression of his ‘sources’ will have to be left aside here, among them the somewhat ironic fact – ironic, given his general attitude to Aristotle – that the picture of Archilochus as a Dionysian musician is partly dependent on the testimony of Aristotle's Politics about the ecstatic ‘melodies of Olympus’.Footnote ³⁵ For the purposes of my present argument I want to focus on the startling way in which Nietzsche translates his conception of the lyric musician-cum-poet into a surrogate for the artistic creativity of what he calls (in a unique use of the term) the world-genius (‘Weltgenius’).Footnote ³⁶ It is precisely à propos the suggestion that human life is itself the artwork of this world-genius or world-artist that Nietzsche introduces (and in curiously parenthetic fashion) the very proposition that ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified’. The proposition accordingly shifts us into deeply mysterious territory, positing a world in which humans are themselves figures in a work of art.Footnote ³⁷ Nietzsche twice asserts that life's entire ‘comedy of art’ (‘Kunstkomödie’) is created by, and performed for the pleasure of, the world-artist, while we humans ourselves know no more of our artistic significance than do soldiers, as he puts it, on a painted canvas.Footnote ³⁸

Many discussions of the aesthetics of The Birth of Tragedy smooth out the strangeness of this passage in §5. In the ‘Attempt at Self-Criticism’, indeed, Nietzsche himself partially does so by connecting his provocative aphorism with the conviction expressed in the ‘Foreword to Wagner’, already quoted, that art is the ‘highest task and the truly metaphysical activity’ of human life (my emphasis). But BT §5, with its extravagant image of a world-artist, explicitly locates its principle of aesthetic justification beyond the consciousness or perspective of human beings themselves.Footnote ³⁹ It is essential to observe here that, had he wanted to, Nietzsche could have hypothesised the cosmic aesthetic of a world-artist without making this inaccessible to human minds: on the Greek side, after all, antecedents for such a view were to be found both in Plato (including, in different ways, passages of the Symposium and Timaeus)Footnote ⁴⁰ and in Stoicism. But to do that would have been to produce something in the mould of a traditional theodicy – an external justification which human minds could nonetheless come to understand – rather than the scandalous anti-theodicy which The Birth of Tragedy advocates. In fact, it is, I suggest, Nietzsche's ambiguous motivation – to discard the theological and moral framework of a theodicy while at the same time gesturing ostentatiously towards what he elsewhere calls an aesthetic ‘cosmodicy’ (‘Kosmodicee’) – which draws him into his exorbitant trope of the world-artist, with human life as the latter's art-work.Footnote ⁴¹ Far from clarifying the aesthetics of the argument up to this point, then, the aphorism in question creates a riddle. Whether its later occurrence can be said to solve the riddle remains to be seen.

In the space that intervenes between the two occurrences of the aphorism, however, there is much that is germane to the concept of an aesthetic justification of life. BT §7, whose main theme (silently and dubiously extrapolated from ch. 4 of Aristotle's Poetics)Footnote ⁴² is the putative origin of tragedy in a Dionysian satyr chorus, introduces two relevant claims: the first and more specific of these is that ‘every true tragedy’ affords its audience a ‘metaphysical consolation’ in the form of a sense that life itself is indestructibly powerful and joyous; the second, that (seemingly) all art, from the sublime to the comic, blocks our life-denying tendencies (towards either disgust or existential absurdity) by creating images or representations ‘with which it is possible to live’.Footnote ⁴³ The anti-Schopenhauerian cast of both claims has been much discussed, but the relationship between them is uncertain. Tragedy's ‘metaphysical consolation’ appears to be an exclusively Dionysian experience (a sublime intimation of the unity of being beneath the illusion of individuation), concentrated in a moment of ecstatic self-forgetting, though Nietzsche is ambiguous about whether it can or cannot last longer than the duration of the temporary Dionysian state itself.Footnote ⁴⁴ Certainly he proceeds to speak of the risk of life-denying revulsion when we emerge from that state, and in consequence he invokes art as a form of ‘healing’ (one of his silent appropriations, incidentally, of a quasi-Aristotelian vocabulary of catharsis)Footnote ⁴⁵ which operates through the generation of those images or ‘representations’ (‘Vorstellungen’), including images both sublime and comic, ‘with which it is possible to live’.Footnote ⁴⁶ It looks, then, as though BT §7 points towards two different kinds of artistic justification or life-value: one grounded in a powerfully Dionysian experience, the other involving a more general aesthetic of life-enabling and life-validating images of various kinds.

If there is a tension in The Birth of Tragedy between Dionysian and Apolline versions of the principle of an aesthetic justification of existence, this is in part entangled, I want to claim, with the ‘inverted Platonism’ to which I have already drawn attention with regard to §4 and which reappears in §9's allusions to the Republic’s Cave analogy.Footnote ⁴⁷ In this second passage, Nietzsche compares the Apolline clarity of the language of Sophoclean heroes to ‘a light-image projected on a dark wall’.Footnote ⁴⁸ In terms which additionally resonate with what one might call an Oedipal irony, he interprets such Apolline images as the opposite of a normal optical phenomenon (the appearance of dark spots in the eyes of those who have looked directly at the sun) and pronounces that they are needed to ‘heal’ the mental vision which, in tragedy, is damaged by gazing into the terrible darkness of nature's underlying truth – ‘luminous spots, as it were, to heal the sight seared by gruesome night’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In Plato's Republic, the images on the wall of the Cave are, of course, no more than flickering shadows; anyone who escapes the Cave will find it difficult at first to accustom their eyes to the real light outside, but in time they can progress philosophically to the supreme vantage point from which to gaze (symbolically) at the sun itself. Nietzsche does not straightforwardly invert the Platonic scheme of reference; he manipulates it with a subtle sense of irony. Gazing at the ultimate truth, in The Birth of Tragedy, is (or would be) a matter of staring into the bleakest darkness; but this is something with which it is impossible to live. The book's aesthetic metaphysics makes the bright Apolline illusions of art the necessary remedy, as though art were a new way of overcoming existence inside the Cave. Yet those illusions are themselves only light-images on the Cave-like wall of darkness, from which it would seem to follow that escape from the Cave is neither possible nor desirable. Art, for Nietzsche, becomes a way of living in the Cave while beign protected against the terror of its darkness.

As a rider to the points just made, it is worth noticing that while BT §9 contains no explicit reference to Plato, the philosopher is named near the beginning of the following chapter, and for a distinction, glossed by Nietzsche as one between ‘idea’ (ἰδέα) and ‘idol’ (εἴδωλον), which is highly pertinent to the Cave itself as well as to the aesthetics of Republic 10. What is more, Nietzsche boldly and surprisingly asserts that the Platonic distinction in question was deeply embedded in a quintessentially Greek mentality. This assertion goes against the grain of Nietzsche's attitude to Platonic idealism in many other places, but it seems here to function as an oblique and displaced acknowledgement of his adaptation of the imagery of the Cave in the previous chapter. Although The Birth of Tragedy is, among much else, an anti-Platonic rhapsody, a repudiation of any scheme of values which ‘justifies the world’ with a transcendent alignment between truth and goodness (or knowledge and virtue), it also represents a stage of Nietzsche's thought at which he is drawn, partly via Schopenhauer, to a dualistic metaphysics of reality and appearances that preserves a kind of Platonic scaffolding even in the act of dismantling the edifice behind it.

The tension already highlighted between an Apolline and a Dionysian inflection of The Birth of Tragedy’s master-thought of the aesthetic justification of existence resurfaces, and becomes more acute, in §16. It is here, on the basis of assumptions whose historically flimsy nature he later came to admit, that Nietzsche states most unequivocally that tragedy is impossible without ‘the spirit of music’ – from which it follows, once again, that Homeric epic could never be considered as a vehicle of the tragic. For Nietzsche, the paradox of tragic pleasure, which he couches in terms of delight in the destruction of individuals, can be resolved only if tragedy's audience is somehow instinctively or unconsciously in possession of the Dionysian wisdom (previously formulated in §7 in particular) that life itself, beneath and beyond the existence of individuals (a mere epiphenomenon of the Will), is eternal and indestructible. ‘“We believe in life eternal”, proclaims tragedy’, as Nietzsche puts it in his most blatant and deliberately shocking appropriation of Christian vocabulary.Footnote ⁵⁰ If there is an aesthetic justification of existence or the world implied here, it is one for which the value of ‘life’ is irreducibly supra-individual, not one, in the terms of §7, which can provide images ‘to live with’.

Nietzsche could not, in fact, be more explicit about the difference between this Dionysian experience and the life-enabling value of Apolline images which he had affirmed at the outset of the work. At the end of §16, he says that Apolline images (in the plastic arts, but the point must apply to Homeric epic as well) offer a ‘radiant glorification’ of the realm of human appearances as such, but at the same time a kind of concealment by lies (and Nietzsche's talk of aesthetic ‘lies’ is always part of his inverted Platonism) which allows the impression that beauty can achieve a triumph over suffering.Footnote ⁵¹ We are thus faced with a seeming incommensurability between Dionysian and Apolline justifications of life, but now in the very place where the union of the Dionysian and Apolline is supposed to occur. The Apolline images of tragedy, on Nietzsche's definition, cannot be in themselves tragic (otherwise Homeric epic too would be tragic), only a surface of beautiful appearances. But how can their beauty, whose value is embodied in the glorification of individual lives, co-exist – even fuse – with a Dionysian delight in the destruction of those same individuals?

A clue to the conceptual problems with which Nietzsche is grappling in BT §16 may be provided by the statement, early in the following section, that the tragic audience's joy is experienced ‘despite pity and fear’.Footnote ⁵² This remark comes as a somewhat disconcertingly abrupt concession to a quasi-Aristotelian account of the status of tragic emotions, though Nietzsche had in fact referred to the canonical combination of pity and fear earlier in the book as well, when contrasting the artifice of Euripides’ prologues with the way in which Aeschylus and Sophocles prompt their audiences to feel pity and sympathetic fear (‘Mitleiden und Mitfürchten’) for their characters.Footnote ⁵³ Later on, Nietzsche will show little respect for Aristotle as the figurehead of a long tradition of explaining tragedy in what he calls moral–pathological terms, i.e. with reference to emotional catharsis, rather than as a truly aesthetic phenomenon. But at the start of §17 it is as if he momentarily accepts Aristotle's terms of reference as a way of characterising the surface psychology of tragedy's audience – but only its surface psychology.Footnote ⁵⁴ That implication is then extended, however, by a remarkable admission. While Nietzsche stands by his twin theses of the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music and the primary significance of the chorus, he suddenly declares: ‘[T]he meaning of tragic myth so far put forward never became conceptually clear and transparent to the Greek poets, still less to the Greek philosophers’.Footnote ⁵⁵

That statement is not always sufficiently appreciated for what it is: an astonishing declaration, at an advanced stage of The Birth of Tragedy, that the Greeks themselves did not understand the tragic art-form which their culture had created.Footnote ⁵⁶ Although Nietzsche tries to qualify and soften the point by saying that the full force of Greek tragedy cannot be gauged from its language alone and involved a holistic experience, including its music, which we can now scarcely reconstruct,Footnote ⁵⁷ this only accentuates a degree of discomfort in his position. His fundamental stance remains piquant: he purports to understand the Greeks, and above all the deepest wisdom of their culture, better than they could understand themselves,Footnote ⁵⁸ and he correspondingly falls back on the idea, adapted from the words of the Egyptian priest to Solon in Plato's Timaeus, that the Greeks were eternal children. Although that last idea had widespread currency in German philhellenism and can be traced in, among others, both Jacob Burckhardt and Karl Marx,Footnote ⁵⁹ Nietzsche is struggling here with the fact that some of his most important premises – above all, the notion of a Dionysian sense of the indestructibility of ‘eternal life’ – have little or no anchorage in the texts of the surviving tragedies or in the conceptions of tragedy found in our main classical sources, Gorgias, Plato and Aristotle: sources with which Nietzsche is in submerged, as well as intermittently explicit, dialogue.Footnote ⁶⁰ This places Nietzsche's views on a plane of anthropological meta-theory whose hermeneutics require inordinate faith in the theorist's own intuitive–creative powers of insight. Even so, it does not invalidate his theory as a whole. It just makes it an extreme case of a kind of theorising which a great deal of intellectual and cultural history, self-consciously or otherwise, finds it hard to avoid altogether.

We need to bear that point in mind when returning once more to the issue of an aesthetic justification of the world. It is my contention, in brief, that if we look for Greek analogues to such a view, they are to be located chiefly in the Apolline realm – above all, in the powerful early Greek idea that human suffering can be transmuted into a beauty of song that is fit even for a divine audience.Footnote ⁶¹ But while Nietzsche was aware of this point, he had his own cultural reasons at the date of The Birth of Tragedy for overlaying that awareness with a Dionysian tragic aesthetic whose Greek roots are highly obscure and which accordingly prompts his anomalous statement that the Greeks did not understand their own tragic art-form.Footnote ⁶² The larger upshot is a lingering equivocation about the relationship between Apolline and Dionysian templates for Nietzsche's idea of aesthetic ‘justification’.

That equivocation can be sensed again in connection with BT §19's definition of ‘the highest task of art’, which Nietzsche defines, in imagery reminiscent of a passage from §9 quoted above, as being ‘to release the eye from gazing into the horrors of night and save the individual subject, by the healing balsam of appearances, from the convulsive stirrings of the Will’.Footnote ⁶³ If this definition fits Nietzsche's conception of the role of Apolline illusions in the context of tragedy, that is only because it fits his conception of Apolline art tout court. In other words, the highest task of art – an echo of the phrase Nietzsche had employed in the work's ‘Foreword to Wagner’ when speaking of art as itself ‘the highest task’ of life (see n. 11 above) – can be accomplished in a variety of art-forms and has no intrinsic link with tragedy. Moreover, it seems deeply counterintuitive to suppose that tragedy, of all genres, with its typical emphasis on the unredeemable nature of extreme suffering, could itself be the paradigm of an aesthetic which releases the eye from gazing into the horrors of a metaphysical night. Why, then, should we not infer that the highest task of art is fundamentally Apolline (and all the more Greek for being so), and that it is the Apolline not the Dionysian which explains, if anything can, what Nietzsche means by his mantra of an aesthetic justification of the world? It is certainly possible to show that this is a view which Nietzsche sometimes expresses elsewhere. In, for instance, the notes for his projected critique of classical scholarship, Wir Philologen, in 1875, he ascribes to Greek culture a general tendency to ‘veil’ intellectual pessimism with the ‘lies’ of art, thereby converting suffering into a source of aesthetic delight; and when he adds ‘vide tragoediam’, tragedy has the status of a clinching illustration, not a unique case which calls for additional metaphysical assumptions.Footnote ⁶⁴ Equally, in notebook entries from the early 1870s, tragedy exemplifies the (Apolline) capacity of art in general to make life possible.Footnote ⁶⁵ Yet in The Birth of Tragedy itself, this patently cannot be Nietzsche's final position, since it would make reference to the Dionysian totally redundant.

The issue at stake here leaps out at us if we juxtapose §19's Apolline definition of ‘the highest task of art’ with the claim in §21 that it is only when, in the final analysis, Apollo speaks the language of Dionysus that ‘the highest goal of tragedy and of art in general’ (my emphasis) is achieved.Footnote ⁶⁶ While this is self-evidently in keeping with the book's aim of giving an account of tragedy in which the Dionysian and the Apolline enter into a unique symbiosis, it nonetheless exposes a fault line in the foundations of Nietzsche's aesthetics. For much of the work, as in a great deal of his later writings, Nietzsche associates the quintessential aesthetic experience with artistic illusionism, which is itself, as I have tried to show, aligned with his inverted Platonism; and he sometimes goes further, identifying ‘art’ tout court with the Apolline.Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet the Dionysian demands to be given a special, metaphysical ranking in Nietzsche's aesthetic evaluations, and in §21 this leads to an ostensible contradiction of what is said or suggested in a number of earlier passages.

It is only at a late stage in The Birth of Tragedy that Nietzsche comes close to admitting that aesthetic justification of the world must take separate forms in accordance with the polarity of the Apolline and the Dionysian. In §22, he speaks explicitly of Apolline art's ‘justification of the world of individuation’, a justification experienced through pure, will-less aesthetic contemplation, as though the spectators of Apolline art were themselves god-like observers of the human scene;Footnote ⁶⁸ and in the final section (25), he returns to his initial formulation of Apolline art as making existence ‘worth living’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet when he reintroduces his full proposition of an aesthetic justification of existence and the world in §24, before underlining it in §25 by remarking that music and tragic myth ‘justify even the worst of all worlds’, it is unambiguously attached to his account of the Dionysian experience of tragedy.Footnote ⁷⁰ Nor can we conclude that tragedy simply adds the Dionysian to the Apolline: on the contrary, Nietzsche states that the Apolline cannot achieve its full aesthetic effect (of pure, will-less contemplation) in the context of tragedy, and even that the Dionysian ultimately ‘negates’ the Apolline delight in aesthetic semblance or illusion.Footnote ⁷¹

If the Dionysian, then, offers a ‘justification’ different from the life-enabling illusions of the Apolline, it remains puzzling what that can amount to. Certainly it involves seeing or feeling something which lies beyond the images of tragic suffering. That chimes with Nietzsche's striking statement in §22 that the Dionysian spectator of tragedy experiences a kind of omniscience which penetrates beneath the surfaces of the myth, while at the same time shuddering with horror and wishing to escape from what he understands – or, as Nietzsche unforgettably encapsulates it (with a double echo of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus): ‘he looks more and deeper than ever before, yet wishes he were blind’.Footnote ⁷² But the congruence is only partial: ‘omniscience’ may underpin a sense of justification, but hardly a wish to be blind. A crucial further step of thought takes place in §24, precisely in the context of the second appearance of the dictum about aesthetic justification. At the first occurrence of this claim in §5, human beings were emphatically described as unaware of their passive status as elements in a cosmic artwork. Now, however, they are permitted, through tragedy, to adopt a privileged identification with the perspective of the world-artist in the form of a Dionysian recognition that the world of appearances is nothing less than an ‘artistic game’ of perpetual creation and destruction that the Will plays with itself.Footnote ⁷³

To support this model of Dionysian awareness, Nietzsche invokes his favourite Presocratic philosopher, Heraclitus, ascribing to him a comparison between ‘the world-forming power’ of reality and ‘a child who plays a game moving pieces forwards and backwards and builds piles of sand only to knock them down again’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Nietzsche is here silently assimilating the Stoicising interpretation of Heraclitus developed by Jacob Bernays, an interpretation which incorporates a questionable fusion of two different images: one, Heraclitus’ metaphor of time (αἰών: in fact, probably to be understood as ‘lifetime’) as a child playing a board game; the other, a Homeric simile at Il. 15.362–4 which famously compares Apollo (no less!), in the act of destroying the Achaean wall, to a child building and destroying sandcastles on the seashore.Footnote ⁷⁵ But if Nietzsche borrows something from Bernays’ interpretation, he puts it to his own use by converting it into a heavily aestheticised metaphysics. Evidence outside The Birth of Tragedy attests to Nietzsche's conviction that Heraclitus’ world-view was an artistic ‘cosmodicy’ (‘Cosmodicee der Kunst’). Since such a cosmodicy or world-validation is here an alternative to, or replacement for, a theodicy, this means that, in its Dionysian guise, The Birth of Tragedy’s notion of an apparent justification of existence as an aesthetic phenomenon invites us to read it as a would-be piece of Heraclitean philosophy.Footnote ⁷⁶ Here, then, is a final twist in the threads of thought I have been attempting to follow closely through the fabric of The Birth of Tragedy. Having allowed the idea of aesthetic justification to be associated for much of the work with a paradigm of life-enabling Apolline semblances (including the ‘deification’ of human life in the form of the Olympian gods, themselves a projection of artistic imagination), Nietzsche tries to tie together the multiple strands of his aesthetic, including the concept of Dionysian insight into the workings of the (metaphorical) world-artist, with a gesture towards the riddling Heraclitus and his supposed view of reality as an amoral but artistic process of perpetual creation and destruction. By doing so, however, Nietzsche leaves us with a riddle of his own, since we know from other evidence that he actually regarded Heraclitus as an anti-Dionysian thinker committed to Apolline values of semblance and play.Footnote ⁷⁷ This is a riddle to which Nietzsche must have known that even he himself did not possess the solution.