In Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy) (1872) the Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche first expressed the notion that tragedy is composed of two fundamental elements: the Apollonian (that is related to the Greek god Apollo, who is here used as a symbol for measured restraint and harmony) and the Dionysian (from Dionysus, the Greek god of ecstasy, used a symbol of unbridled passion). Nietzsche’s formulation of the Apollonian was, however, very similar to that which Shopenhauer had previously termed ‘the individual phenomenon’ (or a particular chance, error, or man, for which individuality is simply a mask for the essential truth of the reality that it conceals) and what he had termed the Dionysian was also derived from Shopenhauer’s Dionysian element (a sense of universal reality, which is experienced after the loss of individual egoism). In Nietzsche’s formulation, "Dionysian ecstasy" is experienced "not as individuals but as the one living being, with whose creative joy we are united."

Nietzsche was radical in that he dismissed one of the most honoured and revered features of the criticism of tragedy out of hand; he refuted attempts to reconcile ethics with art. Nietzsche agreed that the events of any individual tragedy are "supposed" to discharge pity and fear and are "supposed" to elevate and inspire by the triumph of noble principles at the sacrifice of the hero; but art, he claimed, must also demand purity within its own sphere. To explain tragic myth, Nietzsche saw the first requirement as a search for pleasure that was peculiar to a purely aesthetic sphere, without bringing in questions of pity, fear, or drawing morally uplifting conclusions.

The essence of what Nietzsche defined as a ‘specifically aesthetic tragic effect’ is that it both reveals and conceals; it causes both pain and joy. The exhibition of the phenomena of suffering individuals that is particular to Greek Tragedy (its Apollonian elements) forces upon audiences "the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena," these in turn communicate "the exuberant fertility of the universal," so that spectators then "become, as it were, one with the infinite primordial in existence, and … anticipate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility and eternity of this joy." Nietzsche thus concluded that there is a desire to see "tragedy and at the same time to get beyond all seeing ... to hear and at the same time long to get beyond all hearing."

Several philosophers have seen in the inspired force of Nietzsche’s vision an inextricably mingled sense of nihilism. Nietzsche himself claimed:

The philosopher wanted to replace the spirit of science with a conception of existence (and the world) as an aesthetic phenomenon that should only be justified as such. Nietzsche wanted tragedy to occupy a prominent propagandistic place. As he put it, it is "precisely the tragic myth that has to convince us that even the ugly and disharmonic are part of an artistic game that the will in the eternal amplitude of its pleasure plays with itself." He also observed "we have art in order that we may not perish through truth."