The “Theoretical Man of Morality” in The Birth of Tragedy

According to one interpretation of The Birth of Tragedy, section 15 is seen not as a turning-point (from the Greeks to the modern) but as the most appropriate end. The concluding paragraph, an all-important statement that will be presented in due time is, for Walter Kaufmann, the place at which the book should have naturally finished. Our relationship to an original English translator and interpreter is not complete; scholarship is always a matter of tradition and re-appraisal. “The book might well end at this point—as the original version did…. The discussion of the birth and death of tragedy is finished in the main, and the following celebration of the rebirth of tragedy weakens the book and was shortly regretted by Nietzsche himself.” The editorializing feels heavy-handed, to the point of redaction interference for two main reasons: Kaufmann makes an assumptions about the last ten sections being about the “rebirth of tragedy” (which, in my estimate, it is not), and for not recognizing Nietzsche’s argument about the drive of modernity and where it was eventually heading. The post-15 sections do not “weaken” the book and one does wonder in what way, if any, Nietzsche “regretted” publishing the ten more sections that leave us with an on-going reflection, repeated in the 1872 lectures, on the meaning of education for the individual, language, and the metaphysics of truth. The unique philology on the birth of tragedy, in the first fifteen sections, make up the substance of the first half of the book and the idiosyncratic philology. Its merits have been endlessly presented and debated. The remaining ten sections are significant for entirely different reasons that are not related to tragedy (as a Greek phenomenon) but rather to a modern reality. They are significant for introducing one more element of an entire philosophical preparation for renewing the value and purpose of existence and for identifying those who are actively undermining the effort. Once the manifest themes of the work are suspended and, at this point, the tragic, the musical, and the pessimistic are no longer taken into consideration, another interpretation comes into view than accomplishes several aims at once. There is nothing here “between the lines,” as the wily philologist told us about in the act of reading. The repetitions of one reality and the double-threat of modernity are spelled out without ambiguity.