Theoría Revista del Colegio de Filosofía (Dec 1999)

Metafísica y política en El nacimiento de la tragedia

  • José Emilio Esteban Enguita

DOI
https://doi.org/10.22201/ffyl.16656415p.1999.8-9.219
Journal volume & issue
no. 8-9

Abstract

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This text aims at throwing light on the political thought which is implicit in The Birth of the Tragedy, and in the Posthumous Writings. Although politics appears not to be important in a work on aesthetics and metaphysics, the author shows that tragic experience is intimately related with the need for a tragic state. The ecstasies of the Dionysian experience form the ethos of the citizen, and nourish the political institutions which, in their turn, allow the artistic liberation of Dionysian forces. Furthermore, the author shows that, to Nietzsche, Euripides represents not only the decadence of tragedy, but also the destruction of the Greek polis and the transformation of the citizen in a mediocre bourgeois. Politics is certainly not the base of existence, but is a mere normativity which changes with aesthetic conceptions. Nevertheless, in his view of politics, Nietzsche responds to the question concerning the value of politics and, accordingly, responds to the essential question of all political philosophy.

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