Published in 1872, The Birth of Tragedy is the birth certificate of a philosopher convinced that only confrontation with what is foreign to us gives us access to ourselves. By questioning the genesis of the ancient tragedy from the impulses of the Apollolinian and the Dionysiac, Nietzsche sheds light on the sense of pessimism inherent in presocratic Greece. This "pessimism of force", lucid as to the painful nature of human life, does not exclude, but instead reinforces the desire to exist. By contrast, Nietzsche also questions another form of pessimism: the nihilism that is suffering in modern Europe, a paradoxical consequence of socratic rationalism. The birth of tragedy thus inaugurates a radically new form of philosophy: a philosophy which, against triumphant rationality, reveals the impulseal background of all human activity, and which strives to compare and evaluate cultures, with a view to better understanding the present and transforming the future.