The earth gladly offers up her gifts, and the ferocious creatures of the cliffs peacefully draw near."At the opposite end of this spectrum stood Apollo the God of moderation and knowledge, also the God of representational arts who we find " as an ethical deity, demands moderation from his followers and in order to maintain it, self knowledge". The Apollonian dictates; "know thyself" and "nothing to excess", in other words to experience oneself as a complete and self contained independent entity of sober character seems to contradict the Dionysiac call which invites us to do the opposite; to, as it were, forget the individual self by being excessive in order to embrace a group consciousness. Although initially apparently unsympathetic to Dionysiac …show more content…
Thus we have arrived at a point where one could conceivably argue is Nietzsche's central claim. Man lives in opposition and resistance to the Dionysiac perspective in order to pursue information on an individual level, man's obsession with information creating the very problems he wishes to avoid.To leave matters lie and to not pursue this work any further would be to make the very mistake that Nietzsche is attempting to bring in to awareness. To pursue an understanding of such opus through a purely rational analysis of the text would be to rely exclusively on an Apollonian perspective. To, as it were, take on the mantle of the "Alexandrian man", or the "book-keeper". A particularly unfortunate and inexcusable error given the nature of Birth of Tragedy. To allow any single aspect of this work to stand out over others is to allow the "principium individuationis" to operate with free reign on a literary or philosophical level. A process which on a human level Nietzsche has made clear reduces man to less than he is and we are therefore advised to think twice before employing this logic to define Birth of Tragedy. …show more content…
We are now considering a work that we know was eagerly awaited, and subsequently heavily criticized by his academic peers. This same work however was very much welcomed by Wagner who was so highly impressed with Nietzsche he wrote to him to say that he had "never read anything more beautiful than your book" . Wagner's wife, Cosima believed Birth of Tragedy to be divinely inspired. She wrote to Nietzsche to saying:You have summoned spirits in this book which I believed were only forthcoming at the behest of our Master" .These facts further our insight in an attempt to understand and identify the claims of Birth of Tragedy. It can and is to be considered a work of art in and of itself .The fact that it was shunned by his fellow theorists and welcomed by one of the most accomplished musical geniuses of his time would certainly seem to provide some evidence for this stance. Further evidence for this interpretation exists in an examination of the language and phraseology used in the text.