Nietzsche in the Trap of Metaphysics: A Derridean Reading of The Birth of Tragedy

Paul Gauguin’s Bacchanal. AI art

 Introduction

“We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is foreign to this history; we can only operate within it using concepts, however contaminated they may be, to destroy them. We cannot step outside this game.” —Jacques Derrida

In this often-cited statement from “Structure, Sign and Play,” Derrida encapsulates one of the defining tensions of his deconstructive method: the impossibility of stepping outside the metaphysical tradition while simultaneously interrogating it. Every critique of metaphysics, he insists, remains articulated in the very language it seeks to dismantle. In this light, the most subversive thinkers—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Saussure—are not exempt. They may expose the fault lines of metaphysical binaries, but they do so from within the structures they aim to transcend. This article explores that paradox in Nietzsche’s early work The Birth of Tragedy, focusing specifically on §2 as a case study. Although Nietzsche would later go on to launch a full-scale assault on concepts like truth, morality, and origin, his treatment of the Greeks in this early text betrays a residual metaphysical and ethnocentric orientation—one that Derrida’s insights can help us expose and reframe.

The Inescapability of Metaphysics

Derrida’s critique of Western philosophy centers on its privileging of presence, identity, and origin—what he terms logocentrism. This metaphysical heritage presupposes stable meanings grounded in immediate presence, whether in consciousness, logos, or divine authority. But for Derrida, meaning is always deferred, displaced, mediated—what he calls différance. Despite this, our conceptual apparatus remains caught in the very system we critique. We speak against metaphysics using its terms. Thus, deconstruction is not a destruction from outside, but an immanent gesture: a way of showing how texts deconstruct themselves through internal contradictions.

Derrida recognizes that thinkers like Nietzsche challenge logocentrism in radical ways. Yet even they cannot fully sever ties with metaphysical thought. This is not a failing, but an inevitability—what Derrida calls a necessary contamination. Nietzsche’s oeuvre is a case in point.

Nietzsche’s Late Critique of Metaphysics

In works such as The Genealogy of Morals and Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche openly attacks binary oppositions: truth vs. lie, good vs. evil, being vs. appearance. He exposes their historical contingency and rhetorical function. For Derrida, this makes Nietzsche a kind of proto-deconstructionist. He refuses fixed meaning, embraces multiplicity, and revels in textual play.

Yet Nietzsche frequently reinstates hierarchies, invoking “higher types,” “noble” instincts, and a return to primal forces. This ambivalence—critique from within—is what makes him so compelling. The Birth of Tragedy, although written earlier, already stages this drama. It both critiques and idealizes. It gestures toward the collapse of metaphysical categories while still leaning on them for rhetorical and conceptual force.

To trace how this tension emerges in his earlier work, we now turn to §2 of The Birth of Tragedy.

Dreaming Greeks and Dionysian Barbarians: §2 as Case Study

In §2 of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche elaborates the opposition between the Apollonian and Dionysian as dual art-forces rooted in nature. He praises the Greeks as uniquely capable of reconciling these forces in tragedy. This idealization begins with his contrast between the “dreaming Greeks” and “dreaming modern man.” Nietzsche writes:

“Considering the incredibly precise and unerring plastic power of their eyes, as also their manifest and sincere delight in colours, we can hardly refrain (to the shame of every one born later) from assuming for their very dreams a logical causality of lines and contours, colours and groups, a sequence of scenes resembling their best reliefs, the perfection of which would certainly justify us, if a comparison were possible, in designating the dreaming Greeks as Homers and Homer as a dreaming Greek: in a deeper sense than when modern man, in respect to his dreams, ventures to compare himself with Shakespeare”.

Here, he constructs an ethnocentric hierarchy in which Greek aesthetic sensibility is cast as more coherent, more perfect, than that of modernity. The Greeks are imagined as naturally attuned to ideal form, unlike their intellectual descendants.

The same binary recurs more forcefully in Nietzsche’s contrast between the Dionysian Greek and the Dionysian barbarian. The former channels ecstasy into symbolic, aesthetic form; the latter, by contrast, is described in terms of “sexual licentiousness,” cruelty, and regression to animality:

“On the other hand, we should not have to speak conjecturally, if asked to disclose the immense gap which separated the Dionysian Greek from the Dionysian barbarian. From all quarters of the Ancient World—to say nothing of the modern—from Rome as far as Babylon, we can prove the existence of Dionysian festivals, the type of which bears, at best, the same relation to the Greek festivals as the bearded satyr, who borrowed his name and attributes from the goat, does to Dionysus himself. In nearly every instance the centre of these festivals lay in extravagant sexual licentiousness, the waves of which overwhelmed all family life and its venerable traditions; the very wildest beasts of nature were let loose here, including that detestable mixture of lust and cruelty which has always seemed to me the genuine ‘witches’ draught.’”

This language reproduces not only a metaphysics of purity versus corruption, but also a colonial imaginary, where the Greek stands as the cultural center and the barbarian as its unthinkable outside. And yet—Nietzsche must admit that similar barbaric impulses emerge from “the deepest root of the Hellenic nature”:

“For some time, however, it would seem that the Greeks were perfectly secure and guarded against the feverish agitations of these festivals by the figure of Apollo himself… This opposition became more precarious and even impossible, when, from out of the deepest root of the Hellenic nature, similar impulses finally broke forth and made way for themselves.”

Apollo’s protection fails. The Greeks, too, harbor the same forces they claim to sublimate. So, “the Delphic god, by a seasonably effected reconciliation, was now contented with taking the destructive arms from the hands of his powerful antagonist—in reality, the chasm was not bridged over.” This casual remark—“in reality, the chasm was not bridged over”—is telling.

At this point, Nietzsche offers a subtle but significant turn:

“Only the curious blending and duality in the emotions of the Dionysian revellers reminds one of it—just as medicines remind one of deadly poisons.”

This phrase powerfully evokes Derrida’s concept of the pharmakon: that which is both cure and poison, origin and corruption. In invoking this ambivalence, Nietzsche inadvertently gestures toward the trace—the idea that what is excluded from a system also constitutes it. The barbarian, the impure, the irrational—these are not foreign to the Greek, but latent within it.

The metaphysical binary—Greek/barbarian, Hellenic/modern man, Wild/Sublimated—collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. But it does not disappear. Nietzsche continues to rely on the opposition, even as he exposes its instability.

Conclusion

Nietzsche, especially in his later work, launched a sustained critique of metaphysical thinking, unmasking its values as contingent constructions. Yet in The Birth of Tragedy, particularly in §2, he remains bound to the very distinctions he would later seek to dismantle. His exaltation of the Greeks, his disdain for the barbarian Other, and his invocation of aesthetic purity all betray a logocentric and ethnocentric structure. From a Derridean perspective, this is not surprising. As Derrida insists, there is no position outside metaphysics. Every attempt to escape it re-inscribes its logic, even if only partially and unwittingly. Nietzsche’s brilliance lies not in having escaped metaphysics, but in having dramatized—often poetically—its internal failures and paradoxes. His hammer does not destroy metaphysics. It fractures it, exposing the cracks we still live with.

References

1. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
2. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In Writing and Difference, 278–93. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
3. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by William A. Haussmann. Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1909.
4. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 1990.
5. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.