Section 18 of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy

(I just found this little note I wrote in May 2019, when I was at university studying Nietzsche. B.T. 18 struck me as a germinal microcosm of much of F.N.’s mature philosophy—including his ideas on cultural-historical cycles, underplayed in Nietzsche scholarship, but a special interest of mine.)

“Voracious” creators fuel their activity with illusion, one of the three principal kinds, which correspond to types of society, themselves fuelled (?) by that type of illusion:

Kind: Illusion: Society
Apolline: Veil of beauty: Hellenic
Dionysiac: Undercurrent of “eternal life”: Indian
Socratic: Knowledge as salvation: Alexandrian

At the end of this Socratic cycle, we are in a time of Alexandrianism. Such a society requires a slave-caste to survive: the properly Socratic element is a flower of the culture, a luxury, and consequently fragile. Cf. F.N.’s essay “on the Greek State.”

There is a danger from below in the form of this slave caste grown discontent; and in this is the germ of his insights into resentment become fertile. This class “learn[s] to consider its existence an injustice,” the mere rhetoric of human rights (e.g.) having ceased to “console.”

There is a danger from above: elite disillusionment; critical philosophy; “the blight that lies dormant in the womb of theoretical culture.” The Alexandrian fears the consequences of his form of life and lacks his former confidence. No longer wanting “anything whole,” he doesn’t plunge but dithers on the shore: “at bottom a librarian or a corrector of proofs,” impotent.

But there is also a way onward and upward: a new “tragic man” of “proud audacity” who would live tragically, wean himself off the “art[s] of metaphysical consolation” and train himself for “seriousness and terror.”