An Attempt At Self-Criticism In Nietzsche's The Birth Of Tragedy?

I shall now turn my attention to Nietzsche’s retrospective comments on BT. Specifically, I shall focus on the preface to the second edition of BT, as well as on the pages from Ecce Homo concerning Nietzsche’s first book. Once again, it is significant to observe the meaning of the word metaphysics in these contexts. The term metaphysics occurs four times in the preface to the second edition of The Birth of Tragedy, published in 1886 under the title An Attempt at Self-Criticism. On each occasion, Nietzsche employs the expression ‘artistic metaphysics’, and seems to understand this according to a definition of metaphysics consistent with the one we find in the text's main body.

Let us consider the first instance in particular. Here, we find a

What changes is rather the understanding of art's content what in the late stages of his work Nietzsche calls the ‘Wisdom of Dionysus’, an expression he already employs in BT . However, now this wisdom is not a source of consolation anymore, but rather of an attitude pushing toward the affirmative overcoming of oneself . This wisdom, flows from a proper metaphysical understanding of life, which is now finally unbounded by any suspect metaphysical duality. Hence, I hold that it is not too daring to see in this wisdom a new ‘unblinded metaphysics’ that the author resorts to herald in his 1880’s writings, and which also springs from the Will, now conceived as Will-to-Power. If now the tension of Apollo and Dionysus falls in the field of ‘Socratism’, we can still see in the satyrs' chorus an anticipation of Nietzsche's later themes as he himself acknowledges toward the end of the Attempt to Self-Criticism . Simply, the affirmation of existence now takes place without any reference to some metaphysical framework smelling of Socrates or even Hegel, but rather in the drive of the Will to Power