"Concerning _The Birth of Tragedy._--A book consisting of mere experiences relating to pleasurable and unpleasurable æsthetic states, with a metaphysico-artistic background. At the same time the confession of a romanticist _the sufferer feels the deepest longing for beauty--he begets it_; finally, a product of youth, full of youthful courage and melancholy. "Fundamental psychological experiences: the word 'Apollonian' stands for that state of rapt repose in the presence of a visionary world, in the presence of the world of _beautiful appearance_ designed as a deliverance from _becoming_; the word _Dionysos,_ on the other hand, stands for strenuous becoming, grown self-conscious, in the form of the rampant voluptuousness of the creator, who is also perfectly conscious of the violent anger of the destroyer. "The antagonism of these two attitudes and the _desires_ that underlie them. The first-named would have the vision it conjures up _eternal_: in its light man must be quiescent, apathetic, peaceful, healed, and on friendly terms with himself and all existence; the second strives after creation, after the voluptuousness of wilful creation, _i.e._ constructing and destroying. Creation felt and explained as an instinct would be merely the unremitting inventive action of a dissatisfied being, overflowing with wealth and living at high tension and high pressure,--of a God who would overcome the sorrows of existence by means only of continual changes and transformations,--appearance as a transient and momentary deliverance; the world as an apparent sequence of godlike visions and deliverances. "This metaphysico-artistic attitude is opposed to Schopenhauer's one-sided view which values art, not from the artist's standpoint but from the spectator's, because it brings salvation and deliverance by means of the joy produced by unreal as opposed to the existing or the real (the experience only of him who is suffering and is in despair owing to himself and everything existing).--Deliverance in the _form_ and its eternity (just as Plato may have pictured it, save that he rejoiced in a complete subordination of all too excitable sensibilities, even in the idea itself). To this is opposed the second point of view--art regarded as a phenomenon of the artist, above all of the musician; the torture of being obliged to create, as a Dionysian instinct. "Tragic art, rich in both attitudes, represents the reconciliation of Apollo and Dionysos. Appearance is given the greatest importance by Dionysos; and yet it will be denied and cheerfully denied. This is directed against Schopenhauer's teaching of _Resignation_ as the tragic attitude towards the world. "Against Wagner's theory that music is a means and drama an end. "A desire for tragic myth (for religion and even pessimistic religion) as for a forcing frame in which certain plants flourish.