We are introducing Friedrich Nietzsche's book, The Birth of Tragedy, with the translation by Professor Park Chan-guk of the Department of Philosophy at Seoul National University, a leading scholar in the field of Nietzsche studies in Korea, who corrected errors in eight translated versions published in Korea.


The Birth of Tragedy is widely known to the world as 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian'.
This is Nietzsche's first work, written when he was only 28 years old, and it represents the philosophy of his youth. In this book, Nietzsche deals with the birth (chapters 1-11), death (chapters 11-16), and rebirth (chapters 17 and following) of Greek tragedy. The main content is that 'Greek tragedy was born through the reconciliation of the opposing Apollonian and Dionysian elements, and tragedy met its death when the Apollonian element degenerated into Socratic logical intellectualism and the Dionysian element into the expression of everyday rough emotions, and is being resurrected through Wagner's music.'

At first glance, this book appears to be a classical philological study of the historical origins of Greek tragedy and the events that led to its downfall. However, in fact, because it challenged the classical philology of the time, its significance in the history of philosophy was even greater.
Since Socrates and Plato, Western metaphysics and Western history based on it have promoted learning based on logical intellect as the only path to truth, while belittling tragic music and myth. This book can be seen as a confrontation with that trend.
Nietzsche's ideas have continued to the present day in the Western metaphysics and Western historical critiques of Adorno, Heidegger, and postmodernism and poststructuralism.

This book also addresses the philosophical questions of art, such as what music and tragedy are and what true beauty is, the metaphysical question of what the ultimate basis of the world is, and the questions of what kind of beings humans are and how they should live.
Because of this multidimensional nature, the book has had an impact on many areas.
Above all, it has become an indispensable classic in the theory of tragedy and the philosophy of art, and the idea of ​​'Dionysus' developed by Nietzsche in this book is similar to that of W.
B. Yeats), Mallarmé (S.
Mallarm), Rilke (R.
It has also been an inexhaustible source of inspiration for artists such as M. Rilke and Thomas Mann.
Meanwhile, from the perspective of Nietzsche's own ideological development, this book contains the beginnings of his later developments in the ideas of eternal recurrence, the will to power, and perspectivism.