In this article we aim to support the thesis that Nietzsche, from his first work The Birth of Tragedy, to his last texts, such as Twilight of the Idols, in What I owe to the ancients, proposes a radical transvaluation of the meaning of suffering human. He adopts a completely different perspective from Western metaphysical and religious conceptions, which considered suffering as an objection to life, arising from faults, failures, “sins”, which must be expiated through countless constraints, until inexorable death. (...) The nietzschean transvaluation, with its unique tragic perspective, inaugurated in The Birth of Tragedy and sustained throughout his entire work, far from considering suffering as an objection or imperfection of existence, values it and even exalts it as another modality of becoming. vital, consubstantial and inherent in every affirmation, every pleasure, every possibility of joy. (shrink)

The present paper aims at investigating the meaning and scope of the idea of musical dissonance in The Birth of Tragedy. In reviewing the possible explanatory definitions of this concept, within and outside the speculative-theoretical framework proper to Nietzsche’s first book, we hope to open a path that leads us to rethink the so-called “artist metaphysics”, and, specially, what is generally understood as Dionysian music.

The article revisits the "Essay on Self-Criticism", written by Nietzsche as a late preface toThe Birth of Tragedy, in the 1886 edition. The intention is to show how his interpretation of the Dionysian concept reaches his mature works, among themEcce Homo,Beyond Good and EvilandThus Spoke Zarathustra, and how his self-criticism shows that the presence of Dionysus would never cease to occupy a decisive place in his thought.

This article aims to reflect on the genesis of The Birth of Tragedy based on Nietzsche's readings of Lectures on Fine Art and Literatur and Lectures on Dramatic Art by August Schlegel. Such readings, begun during his studies in Pforta, span his first years lecturing in Basel until they ultimately took shape in Nietzsche's first work. The goal is to analyze this trek of readings, in order to encover the development process of Nietzsche's thinking regarding the central issues of his (...) first work, such as the Apollonian and Dionysian, epic poetry and dramatic poetry. (shrink)

In this paper I will point out and analyze an ambiguity in the notion of “justification” in Nietzsche's first book: The Birth of Tragedy. This ambiguity concerns the psychological and metaphysical element that allows the world to appear as justified through the process of transfiguration, the act of redemption, and the state of metaphysical solace, which come about either by the discharge of the sufferings of the “Primordial-One” into sublimating appearances and images (which occurs by the effect of the Apollonian (...) Drive), or by the return to the maternal heart of nature through the tearing-apart of the principle of individuation (which occurs by the effect of the Dionysian). An analysis of different passages in which the terms “justification”, “redemption” and “metaphysical solace” appear in the text will allow us to see that, in confrontation with Schopenhauer's pessimism, Nietzsche elaborates two distinct conceptions of aesthetic justification of existence, linked to a teleological interpretation of nature that admits a specific telos for each of its fundamental drives. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to discuss the role played by Plato in The Birth of Tragedy and the extent to which Nietzsche's position in this work would have an echo in his Lectures on Plato, presented from 1871 to 1876 at the University of Basel. It analyzes Plato's image as someone who, being both a philosopher and an artist, allows us to bring into question the assumed boundaries between art and philosophy, while also making us think whether the (...) arising philosophy in Greece could be thought of as a form of art that denies itself from within. (shrink)

We intend to present a conjecture on the relation between this book and the rest of Nietzsche´s works and indicate the lines in which direction one may develop it. Thus, projecting a continuist reading of these works, we consider that The birth of tragedy brings in itself “seeds”, traces and even entire formulation blocks that indicate the main research ways to be followed by the philosopher along his whole life. That is: ab ovo, nietzschean thinking will consist of examination of (...) intuitions, themes and ideas already present since his public debut, continuously resumed along different perspectives, so they could surrender all they can through this succession of their conceptual and poetic reworking. (shrink)

This paper studies the Nietzschean perspective on the character Carmen in Bizet's opera and on the tragic love relationship in which she participates. We propose that the attraction aroused by Carmen is sincerely experienced by Nietzsche. Thus, Carmen is by no means limited to an anti-Wagnerian figure, but she is entirely a Nietzschean figure. In addition to researching the German philosopher's different points of view on man-woman love relationships, we study the aesthetic considerations that these perspectives encompass. Nietzsche's aesthetic admiration (...) of Bizet's work should not be understood as something to be applied to customs. (shrink)

This article demonstrates that immoralism does not sum up the Nietzschean position. Nietzsche made use of ethical categories - notably the categories of “duty”, “virtue”, “justice” or “compassion” - in order to propose a new philosophy of the body. In this attempt to plunge morality back into the heart of organism, Nietzsche reforms morality on physiological grounds. This gesture aims at reconstructing the laws of action.

The first fragment in which Nietzsche refers to the eternal recurrence is known for its obscurity. In this paper, we intend to contribute to the philosophical genesis of this thought, by contextualizing it in the experimental philosophy since Dawn and by determining the links between this fragment and the previous texts since 1880. Therefore, the idea of eternal recurrence appears to be based on a different representation of reality, resulting from what Nietzsche calls “the passion of knowledge”, a crucial notion (...) that introduces his philosophy of affirmation. (shrink)

In Nietzsche’s musical aesthetics, Wagner’s name dominates, progressively rivalled by Bizet’s. Palestrina is certainly much more discreet but no less significant, from Human, All Too human to The Case of Wagner. This article shows the role played by this Renaissance composer, whose work is marked by religiosity, on Nietzsche’s musical aesthetics. At first antithetical to opera culture, which Nietzsche criticizes in The Birth of Tragedy, he also embodies artistic perfection, especially of the medieval choral tradition. Finally, Palestrina represents for Nietzsche (...) an alternative to the Schopenhauerian aesthetic and the triumphant Wagnerism of the 1880s. (shrink)

Works on the relationship between Nietzsche and tragedy or between Nietzsche and art are numerous. In contrast, Nietzsche’s relation to the theater has been considered about far less. It is surprising, however, to compare the value of theater in The Birth of Tragedy and the harsh criticism of theater in The Case of Wagner. We question Nietzsche’s radical change of stance on the meaning that must be given to this severe criticism.

The purpose of our study is to demonstrate through an array of three themes that the role of the thought of Epicurus is central throughout the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. In doing so, we are going to study several themes among which the duality between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the Übermensch and finally décadence (as the word is used in French by Nietzsche) and which Nietzsche associates to Epicurus in his last period. Our theoretical proposal consists of saying that (...) there is a common thread of the Epicurean thought in the Nietzschean works that makes it an important source of inspiration throughout his works in order to build some of his main concepts. (shrink)

The "sovereign individual" appears as a hapax in the Nietzschean corpus. However, many commentators have seen in it as a kind of compendium of Nietzschean philosophy as if, through this figure, Nietzsche were defending an extreme, autarkic and even ferocious individualism. In contrast to these reductionist interpretations, this article puts the notion of the sovereign individual into the long history of morals. Which means to rethinking individuality as the fruit of a long history, and to making subjectivity not a founding (...) but a derived instance. Finally, we outline some contemporary extensions of this Nietzschean approach to individuality in Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. (shrink)

In this essay, we would like to question the recovery and inversion of Terence's formula "I am the closest to myself", in Nietzsche's terms: "Jeder ist sich selbst der Fernst (Each one is to himself the farthest)", found in the first paragraph of the Preface to the Genealogy of Morals. Taking into account the context in which it appears, we propose below a commentary of this paragraph alongside an interpretation of this formula. We would like to question the way Nietzsche (...) relates this formula to the difficulty of acquiring self-knowledge, on which the beginning of the Genealogy of Morals insists. Does this sentence according to which "Each one is to himself the farthest" mean that a knowledge of oneself by oneself would be a futile exercise and that others would necessarily know us better than ourselves, such that the detour by otherness would constitute an obligatory passage for self-knowledge? But Nietzsche tells us from the outset that this Delphic ideal has never been achieved because the exercise has never been really attempted in the first place. Is it then that the beginning of the Genealogy of Morals indeed tries to prevent any self-knowledge (because it would be possible to know everything but the self), or, is there not another more interesting way to understand this formula according to which we are the most distant to ourselves? We would like to show two things in this regard: firstly, that Nietzsche does not prohibit self-knowledge here, but invites us to think about it differently; and secondly, that the formula according to which "everyone is the furthest away from himself" can also be understood as an injunction to keep the self always at a distance. The two dimensions are then linked, since we maintain that self-knowledge in the classical sense can and must be positively replaced in Nietzsche by an interpretation of the self, and that this interpretation must never be thought of as an undertaking to grasp the self once and for all, which would amount to reifying it by taking it out of becoming. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to seek out the prototype of the last man in Dawn, Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality (1881) and to present them in the light of the critique of prejudices as it is carried out in this work. In the third book, in particular, one can find an exact representation of the last man. Under the features of modern humanity and its prejudices, it is first and foremost the aporia of a certain type of (...) man that Nietzsche highlights before appealing to the arrival of the superman a few years later. (shrink)

Over the years, research in the field of narratological studies has converged towards a unitary vision of narrativity, which is based on a shared interpretation of Aristotle's Poetics. The object of this article is to describe the main characteristics of an alternative model of narrativity, which I propose to call “Nietzschean narratology”. In particular, I emphasize the role that the notion of melancholy plays within the model of aesthetic experience of The Birth of Tragedy. I wish to show that, in (...) this work, Nietzsche criticizes the artificiality of the Aristotelian catharsis, by opposing to it the naturalness of the “Dionysiac melancholy” which, according to him, vivifies the Attic drama. (shrink)