Nietzsche : arte e vida em O Nascimento da Tragédia

Abstract

The present work aims to investigate an affirmation of life through art in Nietzsche's first work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872). We assume that the affirmation of life is already found in the work, so we seek to answer the following problem: why does art affirm life? To serve this manufacturer, a work structure composed of three parts. In the first part, we proceed with the examination of the phenomenon of life as an aesthetic phenomenon, arising from becoming, that is, the Apollonian and the Dionysian as artistic impulses of nature; in a second moment, we analyze the tragic art of the Greeks as an affirmation of life in the face of the terror of becoming; finally we begin to examine the end of tragic art through socratism, as a decline in life. For the development of the research, we adopted the structural method, considering also that Nietzsche is not a systematic author, observing nuances and openings for interpretative lines in his writings. We maintain that life, as an aesthetic phenomenon, is expressed by Nietzsche as artistic impulses of nature, in which Apollo and Dionysus emerge as customizable that preceded the internal movement of becoming, in a simultaneity between creating and destroying; the Apollonian shape and the Dionysian annihilation, constituting the moment of genesis and eternal fertility and pleasure of becoming, which constitutes the phenomenon of life. Becoming, however, appears to man as terrible and desperate, given the instability and the meaninglessness of existence, marked by the violence and cruelty of nature, taking place and diluting itself at every moment. It is only with art that man is saved from the horrors of existence, imitating the artistic powers of nature itself, expressed in Apollo and Dionysus: the beautiful Apollonian appearance of the dream transfigured in the plastic arts, and the Dionysian drunkenness in a mixture of terror and ecstasy expressed in the music. The tragic chorus of the Greeks produced the affirmation of life in all its vicissitudes, even the most cruel. Such an affirmation of life, however, is put in decline by socratism, whose mark is given by the replacement of the aesthetic by the logical, suppressing the Dionysian, and, consequently, the Apollonian, also mortified, since not art, but science becomes the horizon of western thought, petrifying itself in this way of being of reason. Under such a diagnosis of the West, Nietzsche affirms an artistic existence, which, against the denial of will, can finally and tragically say yes.