Aesthetic Phenomena as Religion: A Study of Tristan and Isolde in The Birth of Tragedy

MIt i & only as an aesthetic phenomenon that ex~stence and the world a ~ eternally justified. u this sentence, repeated twice in The Birth of Tragedy, and standing as it does as the essential purpose and motivation of the book, seems to be an intention~l turning about of the Lutheran doctrine of sale fide. Here art appropriates to itself what is essentially a religious_function; art is'the realm of human activity where experiences are ordered and intens-ified, and subsequently, where redemption is to be gained. ~n formulating his ideas on art and on Greek tragedy Nietzsche was influenced by Wagner. It was Wagner's music, above all else, that opened up to Nietzsche new problems for art and religion. The musical dissonance or Tristan opened up to Nietzsche the secret key to Greek tragedy. It was the recognition of the Dionysian origin of tragedy, of_ its origin out of the spirit of music, that enabled Nietzsche to discover the essence of tragedy free from the conventiorr-. al aesthetics, which expected tragedy to answer the criter-ion of the plastic arts, that ~s, of beauty. The Birth of TragedY announced to the world, as Nietzsche wrote to Wagner, that ·practically nothing remains of traditional ~heorles of 'AEsthetics',- In what follows an interpret-ation of the religious significance of this new aesthetics will be offered by way of a study of the role of W~er'