Basic writings of Nietzsche - By Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche & Walter Arnold Kaufmann Page 0,16

stand on your heads!

“This crown of the laugher, the rose-wreath crown: I crown myself with this crown; I myself pronounced holy my laughter. I did not find anyone else today strong enough for that.

“Zarathustra, the dancer; Zarathustra, the light one who beckons with his wings, preparing for a flight, beckoning to all birds, ready and heady, blissfully lightheaded;

“Zarathustra, the soothsayer; Zarathustra, the sooth-laugher; not impatient; not unconditional; one who loves leaps and side-leaps: I crown myself with this crown.

“This crown of the laugher, the rose-wreath crown: to you, my brothers, I throw this crown. Laughter I have pronounced holy: you higher men, learn—to laugh!”

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part IV.13

Sils-Maria, Oberengadin,

August 1886—

1In the first edition of 1872 the title was The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. A second edition with very slight textual changes was printed in 1874 and appeared in 1878. In 1886, the same year that saw the publication of Beyond Good and Evil, the remaining copies of both editions were reissued with the new title page, above. The original title page was also retained but it now followed the “Attempt at a Self-Criticism.”

1An allusion to Schiller’s lines in Wallensteins Lager: “He that has satisfied the best minds of the time has lived for all times.”

2In the arts.

3The profane crowd.

4When Nietzsche died in 1900, Stefan George, the most remarkable German poet of his generation, after Rilke, wrote a poem on “Nietzsche” that ends: “it should have sung, not spoken, this new soul.” For George’s whole poem, see Twenty German Poets: A Bilingual Collection (New York, The Modern Library, 1963).

5The conception of the Dionysian in The Birth differs from Nietzsche’s later conception of the Dionysian. He originally introduced the term to symbolize the tendencies that found expression in the festivals of Dionysus, and contrasted the Dionysian with the Apollinian; but in his later thought the Dionysian stands for the creative employment of the passions and the affirmation of life in spite of suffering—as it were, for the synthesis of the Dionysian, as originally conceived, with the Apollinian—and it is contrasted with the Christian negation of life and extirpation of the passions. In the Twilight of the Idols, written in 1888, the outlook of the old Goethe can thus be called Dionysian (section 49).

6Cf. the words which Heine, in his Schöpfungslieder, attributes to God: “Disease was the most basic ground/of my creative urge and stress;/creating, I could convalesce,/creating, I again grew sound.”

7The book with that title was published in 1886, the same year that the new edition of The Birth of Tragedy appeared, with this preface.

8Untergang, as in the title of Spengler’s Decline of the West, which was influenced decisively by this discussion. Spengler himself says in his preface that he owes “everything” to Goethe and to Nietzsche.

9Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, ed. Julius Frauenstädt (Leipzig, F. A. Brockhaus, 1873). Translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp as World as Will and Idea (London, Kegan Paul, 1907).

10Nietzsche’s coinage.

11The allusion is to the time of Goethe when Germany, at her cultural zenith, was at her political nadir. The whole passage illustrates Nietzsche’s conception of the “will to dominate” and the “will to power.”

12Section 18 below.

13“On the Higher Man,” sections 17-20, quoted by Nietzsche with omissions.

THE

BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

Out of the Spirit of Music

Preface to Richard Wagner

To keep at a distance all the possible scruples, excitements, and misunderstandings that the thoughts united in this essay will occasion, in view of the peculiar character of our aesthetic public, and to be able to write these introductory remarks, too, with the same contemplative delight whose reflection—the distillation of good and elevating hours—is evident on every page, I picture the moment when you, my highly respected friend, will receive this essay. Perhaps after an evening walk in the winter snow, you will behold Prometheus unbound on the title page, read my name, and be convinced at once that, whatever this essay should contain, the author certainly has something serious and urgent to say; also that, as he hatched these ideas, he was communicating with you as if you were present, and hence could write down only what was in keeping with that presence. You will recall that it was during the same period when your splendid Festschrift on Beethoven came into being, amid the terrors and sublimities of the war that had just broken out, that I collected myself for these reflections. Yet anyone would be mistaken if he associated my reflections with the contrast between patriotic excitement and aesthetic enthusiasm, of courageous