Abstract

“How does music stand to image and concept?” (KSA 1, 104) This query in the aesthetics of media is central to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and related early texts; it shapes both their form and content. Nietzsche searches for a mode of non-conceptual philosophizing; he wishes to organize thought as a sequence of suggestive images – thoughts, that is, about that very relationship. Nietzsche’s success or failure in that endeavour becomes clearer against the foil of the 1795 controversy between Friedrich Schiller and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. These disputants rigidly opposed concept and image; they identified a potential for mediation, at best, in the aftermath. Yet Nietzsche realizes that concepts are images whose character as such fell into oblivion. He undermines the established opposition, too, by introducing sound as a third medium. In spite of these insights, both Schiller and Fichte get clearer about possible coalescences of media than Nietzsche who, at the end of The Birth of Tragedy, forces their harmony by opting for Wagner’s ‘total work of art’.