The Birth of The Birth of Tragedy 7.5world... die shopkeepers hawking their goods will use my Book of Songs
for shopping bags, to store coffee or snuff for the old wives of the
future" (Heine 5,232). Other artists were prepared to dispense with the
restrictions of cultural life. Tolstoy, for example, in reaction to the ocean
of social ills that surrounded him, stopped writing toward the end of his
life and called upon writers to contribute to society in more practical
ways than by fabricating stories. His decision marked a prelude to the
epoch of the great destruction of culture in the name of social revolution.
Nietzsche was convinced that his era posed a twofold danger to art.
Art could be destroyed by social revolution, or it could lose its dignity as
an end-in-itself by conforming to social utility. Either it would be swal-
lowed up by a socially oriented movement, or it would join forces with
it and degenerate to political engagement. In either case, bad times
loomed ahead for the muses.
Not all of these reflections were developed in The Birth of Tragedy. Ideas
pertaining to the cultural necessity of war and slavery were only inti-
mated and not stated with the provocative directness of the notes.
Nietzsche pondered the consequences of his conviction that the under-
belly of life was Dionysian-Heraclitean, cruel, vital, and dangerous. Life
was monstrous and not at all the way gende humanism pictured it. In his
1872 essay "On Truth and Falsehood in an Extramoral Sense,"
Nietzsche depicted the relationship of consciousness to the underbelly
of life as follows: "Woe to the portentous curiosity that could manage
to look out of and down from the chamber of consciousness through a
slit and that now began to realize that man rests on the heartless, the
greedy, the insatiable, and the murderous in the indifference of his igno-
rance, hanging in dreams, as it were, on the back of a tiger. In this con-
stellation, where in the world does the urge for truth originate?" (1,877;
TF § 1).
Nietzsche used the term "Dionysian wisdom" (1,67: BT% 9) to des-
ignate this mode of perception, which problematizes the very act of