Dionysus Interpreting Tradition And Nietzsche's The Birth Of Tragedy

This article would depict the relationship between Nietzsche's early work "The Birth of Tragedy" and Dionysus' interpretation tradition in the history of German aesthetic thought,by tracing back to the German Greek tradition since the eighteenth century.This masterpiece is Nietzsche's thorough response and summary of the German Greek aesthetics.This article is mainly composed of three parts: the first two parts are dedicated to building a construction of the ideological background of the interpretation of Nietzsche's text.The first chapter mainly describes the rise of the Greek tradition in Winkelmann's writings,"Noble and quiet" Greece,which is full of order,has become the mainstream in German aesthetic interpretation.Goethe is the successor of classicism,while Lessing and Herder find the essence of "myth as a symbolic speech" from Greek texts,thus forming an opposition with Winckelmann.The second chapter focuses on the history of German Romantic tradition's reception and interpretation of Greek mythology,especially Dionysus mythology.In the works of Creuzer,Schlegel brothers,Schelling,Novalis and Heine,the symbolic image of Dionysus is gradually enriched.Under this theoretical framework,the third chapter is devoted to arguing about the complex connotations of Nietzsche's work,including Nietzsche's acceptance and rebellion of German classicism,Romanticism,Schopenhauer and Wagner's theory,Nietzsche gave Dionysus more profound symbolic connotation in his dualistic model of "ApolloDionysus".Dionysus spirit is the affirmation rather than rejection of the "generation" of life and the "fortuity" of fate.With the birth of tragedy as the starting point,Nietzsche launched a comprehensive reflection on Western metaphysics,and finally surpassed the classical and romantic metaphysics with a new artistic philosophy.