The Birth of Tragedy

That was a painful read. It's a pretty short piece, but it took me three teeth-pulling days to get through it. My general verdict is that some of the observations are very good, but the overall schematization is Hokeyland itself. I especially couldn't suppress my irritation whenever Nietzsche started talking about the Apollo vs. Dionysus interrelationship in art - which means that I was irritated at every other page. And all that nationalism stuff was just plain weird, as expected.

Surprisingly, Nietzsche's observations about Plato turned out to be pretty astute, which is not something I would have hoped for from a thinker so hostile to Socratic philosophy. Of course, after Kaufmann, my standards for talking intelligently about Plato have gone down considerably. Now, as long as you don't say brain-dead things like, "Plato is feminine," I'll grant that you have an okay understanding of Plato.

In conclusion, it was a real labor for me to remember to pick out the merits while I was reading this treatise - so persistent was that hunch that I was essentially reading fluff. There were parts that were acceptable. But all in all, I find this very distressing. I wanted to take a real liking to Nietzsche, seeing as my most-likely-to-be-future-mentor at UCLA is a big Nietzsche buff. I'll have to give the dude another chance...but not just yet. I'll take a fun break first.