The Structural Transformation of The Public Sphere by way of the Aesthetic Transformation of the Public: Nietzsche’s Hope of Wagner’s Magic in The Birth of Tragedy

When we broach the topic of Nietzsche and music, we essentially address Nietzsche’s idea of the meaning and value of music for European culture. Thus, we broach the subject of how Nietzsche perceived Richard Wagner’s music dramas as a way to bring European culture back to its Dionysian origin. By turning to Christian religion, nationalism, and ideas rather than feelings, Wagner later “robbed” music of its Dionysian “worldtransfiguring, affirmative character.” In this article, however, I shall only discuss the hope concerning Wagner’s music drama, Tristan and Isolde in particular, that Nietzsche expressed in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872). In this book, Nietzsche viewed Wagner’s music still as Dionysian, affirmative, and world-transfiguring. I discuss this hope, while I argue that Nietzsche, in a typically Schillerian and Romantic vein, advocates the transformation of the “Socratic,” critical public via art into an “aesthetic public,” i.e., a public that looks at life from an aesthetic viewpoint rather than a moral, pathological, or political one. Such an aesthetic viewpoint offers the metaphysical, deep, yet playful solace against the great worries of life–death, decay, and pointlessness in the face of human life’s finitude–which is the deep existential and psychological need that all human beings have in common.