Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Truth, Interpretation and the Dialectic of Nihilism
- 2 Nietzsche's Subject: Retrieving the Repressed
- 3 Laughter and Sublimity: Reading The Birth of Tragedy
- 4 Wagner, Modernity and the Problem of Transcendence
- 5 Memory, History and Eternal Recurrence: The Aesthetics of Time
- 6 Towards a Physiological Aesthetic
- 7 Art, Truth and Woman: The Raging Discordance
- 8 Overcoming Nihilism: Art, Modernity and Beyond
- Notes
- References
- Index
4 - Wagner, Modernity and the Problem of Transcendence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Truth, Interpretation and the Dialectic of Nihilism
- 2 Nietzsche's Subject: Retrieving the Repressed
- 3 Laughter and Sublimity: Reading The Birth of Tragedy
- 4 Wagner, Modernity and the Problem of Transcendence
- 5 Memory, History and Eternal Recurrence: The Aesthetics of Time
- 6 Towards a Physiological Aesthetic
- 7 Art, Truth and Woman: The Raging Discordance
- 8 Overcoming Nihilism: Art, Modernity and Beyond
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
It may perhaps be recalled, at least among my friends, that initially I approached the modern world with a few crude errors and overestimations and, in any case, hopefully … what I failed to recognise at that time both in philosophical pessimism and in German music was what is really their distinctive character – their romanticism.
(GS§370)In the years following the publication of The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche came either to reject much of its content, or at least to express reservations about the manner of its presentation. He recognised that so many of the important insights of his first book, most especially his 'discovery' of the Dionysian and Apollonian artistic drives, were hindered by the vocabulary used to formulate them. In both the ‘Attempt at a Self-criticism’ with which he prefaced the second edition of the work in 1886, and his later account of it in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche is all too aware that at the time of composition he was still responding to the influence of idealist and Schopenhauerian metaphysics. This is not to imply that the early Nietzsche was an idealist; as I have suggested in previous chapters, his fragmentary writings from the same period as The Birth of Tragedy indicate the existence already of a considerable distance from Schopenhauer. However, while there are significant differences between them, Nietzsche still made use of much of the metaphysical vocabulary inherited from his predecessors.
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- Information
- Nietzsche, Aesthetics and Modernity , pp. 110 - 134Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999