Anany Mishra

This paper offers a plausible understanding of the notion of “myth” and its systemic role in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872). This is carried out against the backdrop of interpretations that evince aporia or irony in Nietzsche’s invocation of the notion of myth, arguing that many alleged aporias arise precisely due to a lack on the part of Nietzsche to provide a sufficiently articulated account of the notion. Towards this end, it proposes that the notion of myth operates in two registers of meaning: first, “myth” as a hermeneutic structure that provides a narrative about reality; second, “Myth” as an “unconscious metaphysics” which is not a doctrinal account of reality, but a prereflective horizon and as the condition of possibility of rendering experience intelligible, distributing evaluative weight and thus essentially grounding forms of life. This distinction enables a nuanced reassessment of Nietzsche’s typology of artistic, tragic, and theoretic myths as competing axiological configurations that project their own (metaphysical) worldviews. This paper further argues that Nietzsche’s critique of Socratism targets not the falsity of its claims but rather its axiological architecture by denying the necessity of illusion and subordinating existence to theoretical justification. Thus, our paper argues that for Nietzsche, the Socratic myth undermines the conditions of affective attachment, perspectival inhabitation, and belief itself.