The Birth of The Birth of Tragedy 63This first lecture already indicates that words bring about the demise
of tragedy. Logos defeats the pathos of tragedy. Tragedy comes to an
end when language is emancipated from music and overwhelms it with
its own logic What is language? An organ of consciousness. Music,
however, is being. With the decline of tragedy, being and consciousness
no longer mesh. Consciousness is closed off from being and becomes
flat. For Nietzsche, the demise of the ancient tragedy of pathos signals
the beginning of the new tragedy of Logos, which, according to him, is
where we still find ourselves today.
Regarding the derivation of tragedy from the festivals of Dionysus,
Nietzsche was still within the boundaries of the classical philology of
his contemporaries. But the main argument of his second lecture, which
was already suggested at the end of the first lecture with a reference to
the "decomposition" (1,530; GMD) of tragedy through intellectualiza-
tion, had to have provoked the philological establishment. For this rea-
son, Nietzsche tried to prevent this lecture from coming to the attention
of his teacher RitschL Ritschl did ultimately hear about it and, as one can
imagine, was hardly pleased. As though Nietzsche needed to atone for
his overly freewheeling jaunts, he offered his teacher a traditional philo-
logical essay for inclusion in an anthology published by the professional
organization Meletemata Societatis philologicae Lipsiensis.
As Nietzsche reported to his friend Rohde in mid-February 1870,
the lecture entitled "Socrates and Tragedy" "aroused terror and mis-
conceptions" (.Β 3,95). What could have been so terrifying and open to
misconceptions about this lecture?
Nietzsche criticized the high esteem accorded to consciousness, par-
ticularly the consequences of Socrates' disastrous idea that "everything
must be conscious to be good" (1,540; ST). First, this idea destroys the
essence of tragedy, and then it proceeds to diminish and impede the cre-
ative unconscious as a whole. Socrates ruptured the power of music and
replaced it with dialectics. He was a disaster who ushered in a rational-
ism that wanted nothing further to do with the depths of being. He
marked the beginning of knowledge devoid of wisdom. In the domain