The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (Penguin Classics)

So if you talk, he got ideas from Nietzsche, the whole idea of the Oedipus complex, the whole idea of incest as the way to become a god comes from Nietzsche. It's in The Birth of Tragedy, that powerful passage at the end of The Birth of Tragedy.

And the classicist who most famously reacts against it is the great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who oddly ends up talking to a horse in a quite kind of Dionysian manner. But very early on in his career, long before that, he published a book called The Birth of Tragedy. He was only 28 when he did it. He was already a professor of Greek.

And essentially in that book, he is doing for Dionysus what Freud would do for Oedipus a couple of decades later. Kind of make him into, I guess you'd call him a meme now.

He published a book called The Birth of Tragedy.

And then, you know, this theme re-emerges and thus breaks Zarathustra. The first metamorphosis of Nietzsche's bermensch is called the camel. ... So at the very kind of, well, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, actually, no, before that, one of his first published works is called The Birth of Tragedy. It's about art.

In Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche makes the case that great artwork has represented in it both the energies of Dionysus and Apollo.