When
Friedrich Nietzsche published
The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, he was a largely unknown classical philologist at the University of Basel, where he had assumed a professorship at the extraordinarily young age of 24. The book—which elicited venomous responses from the mainstream German academy, who attacked Nietzsche for his prophetic style as well as his betrayal of philological-historical method—marked the moment when Nietzsche ceased to be a traditional scholar. Yet this moment inaugurated Nietzsche’s most famous philosophical investigations, as he re-examined and rethought the fundamental principles of Western philosophy all the way back to its ancient Greek roots.
In this course, we will examine Nietzsche’s rejection of “scientific” scholarly method and his parallel articulation of an audacious new theory of ancient Greek tragedy in conversation with Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner. Like these giants of 19th-century German philosophy and art, Nietzsche engaged the ancient world and an unknown future simultaneously. By revivifying and engaging with the Greek deities of Apollo and Dionysos, Nietzsche proposed a mode of understanding tragedy that sets reason and unreason, calm and frenzy, into a dialectical relationship. With these considerations in mind, students will read and discuss
The Birth of Tragedy, as well as other works of the early Nietzsche: “Homer and Classical Philology,” “Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks,” “On Truth and Lying in an Extramoral Sense,”
Untimely Meditations, and extracts from
Human, All-Too-Human, the last book that Nietzsche wrote while still a professional classicist. We will supplement these readings with relevant extracts from the pre-Socratics, Greek tragedy, and Democritus as we consider the ways in which “Nietzsche’s Greeks” facilitate a philosophical critique of culture and reveal the legacy of the past in the present.
Instructor:
Bruce M. King
Bruce M. King has a Ph.D. in Classical Languages and Literature from the University of Chicago. He is especially interested in early Greek poetry and philosophy, as well as in anthropological, psychoanalytic, and queer readings of the classics. He teaches at the Gallatin School of Individual Study at NYU and has also taught at Columbia University, Vassar College, and Swarthmore College.
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