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Friedrich Nietzsche
The Birth of Tragedy
Out of the Spirit of Music
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This translation by Ian Johnston of
Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, BC, has certain copyright
restrictions. For information please use the following link: Copyright. Last
revised January 2009; minor correction made June 2012. A printed paperback
edition of this translation is available from Richer
Resources Publications. If you would like a free Word file of this translation, please contact
Ian
Johnston.
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
TRANSLATOR’S
NOTE
In the following translation, where Nietzsche uses a foreign
phrase this text retains that phrase and includes an English translation in
square brackets and italics immediately afterwards. Explanatory endnotes,
usually to identify a person named in the text or the source of a quotation,
have been added by the translator.
For information about copyright, please consult the
following link: Copyright.
Those readers who would like this text in Word format, so that they can print a
booklet of this translation for themselves or their students should consult the
following link: Publisher.
HISTORICAL NOTE
The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche’s first book,
was published in 1872, when he was 28 years old and a professor of classical
philology at Basel. The book had its defenders but, in general,
provoked a hostile reception in the academic community and affected Nietzsche’s
university career for the worse. As the opening section (added in 1886) makes
clear, Nietzsche himself later had some important reservations about the book.
However, since that time the work has exerted a very important influence on the
history of Western thought, particularly on the interpretations of Greek
culture. It is also a vital introduction to the work of the most provocative
philosopher of modern times.
In later editions part of the title of the book was changed from
“Out of the Spirit of Music” to “Hellenism and Pessimism,” but the former
phrase has remained the more common.
AN ATTEMPT
AT SELF-CRITICISM1
Whatever might have been the basis for this dubious book, it must
have been a question of the utmost importance and charm, as well as a deeply
personal one at the time—testimony to that effect is the period in which it
arose, in spite of which it arose, that disturbing era of the
Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. While the thunderclap of the Battle of Wörth was reverberating across Europe, the meditative
lover of enigmas whose lot it was to father this book sat somewhere in a corner
of the Alps, extremely reflective and perplexed, thus simultaneously very
distressed and carefree, and wrote down his thoughts about the Greeks—the
kernel of that odd and difficult book to which this later preface
(or postscript) should be dedicated.2 A few weeks after
that, he found himself under the walls of Metz, still not yet free of the
question mark which he had set down beside the alleged “serenity” of the Greeks
and of Greek culture, until, in that month of the deepest tension, as peace was
being negotiated in Versailles, he finally came to peace with himself and,
while slowly recovering from an illness he had brought back home with him from the field, finished composing the Birth of Tragedy out
of the Spirit of Music.3—From music? Music and tragedy? The Greeks and the music of tragedy? The Greeks and the
art work of pessimism? The most successful, most beautiful, most envied people,
those with the most encouraging style of life so far—the Greeks? How can this
be? Did they of all people need tragedy? Even more—art? What for—Greek art?
One can guess from all this just where the great question mark
about the worth of existence was placed. Is pessimism necessarily the
sign of collapse, destruction, of disaster, of the exhausted and enfeebled
instincts—as it was with the Indians, as it is now, to all appearances, among
us, the “modern” peoples and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of strength?
An intellectual inclination for what in existence is hard, dreadful, evil, problematic, emerging from what is healthy, from overflowing
well being, from living existence to the full? Is there perhaps a
way of suffering from the very fullness of life? A tempting courage of the
keenest sight which demands what is terrible as the enemy, the
worthy enemy, against which it can test its power, from which it wants to learn
what “to fear” means? What does the tragic myth mean precisely
for the Greeks of the best, strongest, and bravest age? What
about that tremendous phenomenon of the Dionysian?4 And
what about what was born out of the Dionysian—the tragedy? And by contrast,
what are we to make of what killed tragedy—Socratic morality,
dialectic, the satisfaction and serenity of the theoretical man?5 How
about that? Could not this very Socratism [Sokratismus] be a sign of collapse, exhaustion,
sickness, the anarchic dissolution of the instincts? And could the “Greek
serenity” of later Greek periods be only a red sunset? Could the Epicurean
will hostile to pessimism be merely the prudence of a
suffering man?6 And even science itself, our science—indeed,
what does all science in general mean considered as a symptom of life? What is
the point of all that science and, even more serious, where did it come
from? What about that? Is scientific scholarship perhaps only a fear and an
excuse in the face of pessimism? A delicate self-defence against—the Truth? And
speaking morally, something like cowardice and falsehood? Speaking unmorally, a clever trick.7 O
Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret?
O you secretive ironist, was that perhaps your—irony?—
2
What I managed to seize upon at that time, something fearful and
dangerous, was a problem with horns, not necessarily a bull exactly, but in any
event a new problem; today I would state that it was the problem
of science itself—science for the first time grasped as
problematic, as dubious. But that book, in which my youthful courage and suspicion
then spoke, what and impossible book
had to grow out of a task so contrary to the spirit of youth! Created out of
merely premature, really immature personal experiences, which all lay close to
the threshold of something communicable, built on the basis of art—for
the problem of science cannot be understood on the basis of science—a book perhaps
for artists with analytical tendencies and a capacity for retrospection (that
means for exceptions, a type of artist whom it is necessary to seek out and
whom one never wants to look for . . .), full of psychological innovations and
artists’ secrets, with an artist’s metaphysics in the background, a youthful
work, full of the spirit of youth and the melancholy of youth, independent, defiantly
self-sufficient, even where it seemed to bow down with special reverence to an
authority, in short, a first work also in every bad sense of the word,
afflicted, in spite of the problem better suited for old men, with every fault
of youth, above all with its “excessive verbiage” and its “storm and stress.”
On the other hand, looking back on the success the book had (especially with
the great artist to whom it addressed itself, as if in a conversation, that is,
with Richard Wagner), the book proved itself—I mean it was the sort
of book which at any rate was effective enough among “the best
people of its time.”8 For
that reason the book should at this point be handled with some consideration
and discretion. However, I do not want totally to hide how unpleasant the book
seems to me now, how strangely after sixteen years it stands there in front of
me—in front of an older man, a hundred times more discriminating, but with eyes
which have not grown colder in the slightest and which have themselves not
become estranged from the work which that bold book dared to approach for the
first time: to look at science from the perspective of the artist, but
to look at art from the perspective of life.
3
Let me say again: today for me it is an impossible book—I call it
something poorly written, ponderous, embarrassing, with fantastic and confused
imagery, sentimental, here and there so saccharine it is effeminate, uneven in
tempo, without any impulse for logical clarity, extremely self-confident and thus
dispensing with evidence, even distrustful of the relevance of
evidence, like a book for the initiated, like “Music” for those baptized into music,
those who are bound together from the start in secret and esoteric aesthetic
experiences as a secret sign recognized among blood relations in artibus [in the arts]—an arrogant and rhapsodic
book, which right from the start hermetically sealed itself off from the profanum vulgus [profane
rabble] of the “educated,” even more than from the “people,” but a
book which, as its effect proved and continues to prove, must also understand
this issue well enough to search out its fellow rhapsodists and to tempt them
to new secret pathways and dancing grounds. At any rate, here a strange voice
spoke—people admitted that with as much curiosity as aversion—the disciple of
an as yet “unknown God,” who momentarily hid himself under the hood of a
learned man, under the gravity and dialectical solemnity of the German man,
even under the bad manners of a follower of Wagner. Here was a spirit with
alien, even nameless, needs, a memory crammed with questions, experiences, secret
places, beside which the name Dionysus was written like one more question mark.
Here spoke—so people said to themselves suspiciously—something
like a mystic and an almost maenad-like soul, which stammered with difficulty
and arbitrarily, in a foreign language, as it were, almost
uncertain whether it wanted to communicate something or hide itself.9 This
“new soul” should have sung, not spoken! What a shame that I did
not dare to utter as a poet what I had to say at that time; perhaps I might
have been able to do that! Or at least as a philologist —even today in this
area almost everything is still there for philologists to discover and dig up!
Above all, the issue that there is a problem right
here—and that the Greeks will continue to remain, as before, entirely unknown
and unknowable as long as we have no answer to the question, “What is
Dionysian?” . . .
4
Indeed, what is Dionysian?—This book
offers an answer to that question—a “knowledgeable person” speaks there, the
initiate and disciple of his god. Perhaps I would now speak with more care and
less eloquently about such a difficult psychological question as the origin of
tragedy among the Greeks. A basic issue is the relationship of the Greeks to
pain, the degree of their sensitivity—did this relationship remain constant? Or
did it turn itself around?—That question whether their constantly
stronger desire for beauty, for festivals, entertainments, and new
cults really arose out of some lack, out of deprivation, out of melancholy, out
of pain. For if we assume that this particular claim is true—and Pericles, or,
rather, Thucydides, in the great Funeral Oration gives us to understand that it
is—where then must that contradictory desire stem from, which appears earlier
than the desire for beauty, namely, the desire for the ugly, the
good strong willing of the ancient Hellenes for pessimism, for tragic myth, for
pictures of everything fearful, evil, enigmatic, destructive,
and fateful as the basis of existence?10 Where then must
tragedy have come from? Perhaps out of joy, out of power, out of
overflowing health, out of overwhelming fullness? And psychologically speaking,
what then is the meaning of that madness out of which tragic as well as comic
art grew, the Dionysian madness? What? Is
madness perhaps not necessarily the symptom of degradation, of collapse, of
cultural decadence? Are there perhaps—a question for doctors who treat
madness—neuroses associated with health? With
the youth of a people and with youthfulness? What is revealed in
that synthesis of god and goat in the satyr? Out of what personal experience,
what impulse, did the Greek have to imagine the Dionysian enthusiast and original
man as a satyr? And so far as the origin of the tragic chorus is concerned, in
those centuries when the Greek body flourished and the Greek soul bubbled over
with life, were there perhaps endemic raptures? Visions and hallucinations
which entire communities, entire cultural bodies, shared? How’s that? What if
it were the case that the Greeks, right in the richness of their youth, had the
will for the tragic and were pessimists? What if it was
clearly lunacy, to use a saying from Plato, which brought the greatest blessings
throughout Greece? And, on the other hand, what if, to turn the issue around,
it was precisely during the period of their dissolution and weakness that the
Greeks became constantly more optimistic, more superficial, more hypocritical,
and with a greater lust for logic and rational understanding of the world, as
well as “more cheerful” and “more scientific”? What’s this? In spite of all
“modern ideas” and the prejudices of democratic taste, could the victory
of optimism, the developing hegemony of reasonableness, of
practical and theoretical utilitarianism, as well as democracy
itself, which occurs in the same period, perhaps be a symptom of failing power,
of approaching old age, of physiological exhaustion, rather than pessimism? Was
Epicurus an optimist—precisely because he was suffering?—We see that
this book was burdened with an entire bundle of difficult questions—let us add
its most difficult question: What, from the point of view of living,
does morality mean? . . .
5
The preface to Richard Wagner already proposed that art—and not morality—was
the essential metaphysical human activity; in the book itself
there appears many times over the suggestive statement that the existence of
the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. In
fact, the entire book recognizes only an artist’s sense and—a deeper meaning
under everything that happens—a “God,” if you will, but certainly only a
totally unthinking and amoral artist-God, who in creation as in destruction, in
good things as in bad, desires to become aware of his own pleasures and
autocratic power equally, a God who, as he creates worlds, rids himself of
the distress of fullness and superfluity, of the suffering of pressing internal
contradictions. The world is at every moment the attained redemption
of God, as the eternally changing, eternally new vision of the one who suffers
most, who is the most rent with contradictions, the most inconsistent, who
knows how to save himself only in appearances. People may call this entire
artistic metaphysics arbitrary, pointless, and fantastic—the essential point
about it is that it already betrays a spirit which will at some point risk
everything to stand against the moralistic interpretation and
meaningfulness of existence. Here is announced, perhaps for the first time, a
pessimism “beyond good and evil”; here is expressed in word and formula that
“perversity in belief” against which Schopenhauer never grew tired of hurling
his angriest curses and thunderbolts in advance—a philosophy which dares to
place morality itself in the world of phenomena, to subsume it, not merely
under the “visions” (in the sense of some idealistic terminus technicus [technical end point]) but under “illusions,” as an appearance, delusion, fallacy, interpretation, something made up,
a work of art.11 Perhaps
we can best gauge the depth of this tendency hostile to morality from
the careful and antagonistic silence with which Christianity is treated in the
entire book— Christianity as the most excessively thorough elaboration of a moralistic
theme which humanity up to this point has had available to listen to. To tell
the truth, there is nothing which stands in greater opposition to the purely
aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world, as it is taught in
this book, than Christian doctrine, which is and wishes to be merely moralistic
and which, with its absolute standards, beginning, for example, with its truthfulness
of God, relegates art, every art, to the realm of lies—in
other words, which denies art, condemns it, and passes sentence on it. Behind
such a way of thinking and evaluating, which must be hostile to art, so long as
it is in any way genuine, I always perceived also something hostile to
life, the wrathful, vengeful aversion to life itself; for all life rests on
appearance, art, illusion, optics, the need for perspective and for error.
Christianity was from the start essentially and thoroughly life’s disgust and
weariness with life, which only dressed itself up with, only hid itself in,
only decorated itself with the belief in an “other” or “better” life. The hatred
of the “world,” the curse against the emotions, the fear of beauty and
sensuality, a world beyond created so that the world on this side might be more
easily slandered, at bottom a longing for nothingness, for extinction, for
rest, until the “Sabbath of all Sabbaths”—all that, as well as the absolute
desire of Christianity to allow only moral values to count,
has always seemed to me the most dangerous and the weirdest form of all
possible manifestations of a “Will to Destruction,” at least a sign of the
deepest illness, weariness, bad temper, exhaustion, and impoverishment in living—for
in the eyes of morality (and particularly Christian morality, that is, absolute
morality) life must be seen as constantly and inevitably
wrong, because life is something essentially amoral—hence,
pressed down under the weight of contempt and eternal No’s, life must finally
be experienced as something not worth desiring, as something inherently worthless. And what about morality itself? Might
not morality be a “desire for the denial of life,” a secret instinct for
destruction, a principle of decay, diminution, slander, a beginning of the end? And thus, the danger of dangers? . . . And so, my
instinct at that time turned itself against morality in this
questionable book, as an instinct affirming life, and invented for itself a
fundamentally different doctrine and a totally opposite way of evaluating life,
something purely artistic and anti-Christian. What should it be
called? As a philologist and man of words, I baptized it, taking some
liberties— for who knew the correct name of the Antichrist?—after the name of a
Greek god: I called it the Dionysian.—
6
Do people understand the nature of the task I dared to touch on
back then with this book? . . . How much I now regret the fact that at the time
I did not yet have the courage (or the presumptuousness?) to allow myself in
every respect a personal language for such an individual point of view and such daring exploits—that I
sought laboriously to express strange new evaluations with formulas
from Schopenhauer and Kant, something which basically went quite against
the spirit of Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as against their tastes!12 What
then did Schopenhauer think about tragedy? He says, “What gives everything
tragic its characteristic drive for elevation is the working out of the
recognition that the world, that life, can provide no proper satisfaction, and
thus our devotion to it is not worthwhile; the tragic spirit
consists of that insight—it leads therefore to resignation” (The
World as Will and Idea, II,3,37). O how differently Dionysus spoke to me! O
how far from me then was precisely this whole doctrine of resignation! But
there is something much worse about my book, something which I now regret even
more than to have obscured and spoiled Dionysian premonitions with formulas
from Schopenhauer: namely, that I generally ruined for myself
the magnificent problem of the Greeks, as it arose in me, by mixing
it up with the most modern issues! I regret that I tied myself to hopes where
there was nothing to hope for, where everything indicated all too clearly an
end point! That, on the basis of the most recent German music, I began to tell
stories of the “German character,” as if that character might be just about to
discover itself, to find itself again—and that at a time when the German
spirit, which not so long before still had the desire to rule Europe and the
power to assume leadership of Europe, was, as its final testament, simply abdicating forever
and, beneath the ostentatious pretext of founding an empire, making the
transition to a conciliatory moderation, to democracy and “modern ideas”! As a
matter of fact, in the intervening years I have learned to think of that
“German character” with a sufficient lack of hope and of mercy—similarly with
contemporary German music, which is Romantic through and through
and the most un-Greek of all possible art forms, and besides that, a first-rate
corrupter of the nerves, doubly dangerous among a people who love drink and
esteem lack of clarity as a virtue, because that has the dual character of a
drug which simultaneously intoxicates and befuddles the
mind.—Of course, set apart from all the rash hopes and defective practical applications
to present times with which I then spoiled my first book for myself, the great
Dionysian question mark still remains as it is set out there, also in relation
to music: How would one have to create a music which is no longer Romantic
in origin, like the German—but Dionysian?
7
But, my dear sir, what in all the world
is Romantic if your book is not? Can the deep hatred against
“modernism,” “reality,” and “modern ideas” go any further than it does in your
artists’ metaphysics— which would sooner still believe in nothingness or the
devil than in the “here and now”? Does not a fundamental bass note of anger and
desire for destruction rumble underneath all your contrapuntal vocal art and
seductive sounds, a raging determination in opposition to everything
“contemporary,” a desire which is not too distant from practical nihilism and
which seems to say “Better that nothing were true than that you were right, than that your truth
were correct!” Listen to yourself, my pessimistic gentleman and worshipper of art, listen with open ears to a single selected passage
from your book, to that not ineloquent passage about the dragon slayer, which
may sound like an incriminating pied piper to those with young ears and hearts.
What? Is that not a true and proper Romantic declaration of 1830, under the
mask of the pessimism of 1850, behind which is already playing the prelude to
the usual Romantic finale—break, collapse, return, and prostration before an
ancient belief, before the old God . . . What? Isn’t your book
for pessimists itself an anti-Greek and Romantic piece, even something “as intoxicating
as it is befuddling,” in any event, a narcotic, even a piece of music, German
music? Listen to the following:
“Let’s picture for ourselves a generation growing up with this
fearlessness in its gaze, with this heroic push into what is tremendous; let’s
picture for ourselves the bold stride of these dragon slayers, the proud
audacity with which they turn their backs on all the doctrines of weakness
associated with optimism, in order to live with resolution, fully and
completely. Would it not be necessary that the tragic man of
this culture, having trained himself for what is serious and frightening,
desire a new art, the art of metaphysical consolation, the tragedy,
as his own personal Helen of Troy, and to have to cry out with Faust:
With my
desire’s power, should I not call
Into this life the fairest form of all?13
“Would it not be necessary?” . . . No, three times no!
You young Romantics: it should not be necessary! But it is
very likely that things will end up like that—that you will
end up like that—namely, “being consoled,” as it stands written, in spite of
all the self-training for what is serious and frightening, “metaphysically
consoled,” in short, the way Romantics finish up, as Christians. .
. . No! You should first learn the art of consolation in this life—you
should learn to laugh, my young friends, even if you wish to remain
thoroughly pessimistic. From that, as laughing people, some day or other
perhaps you will for once ship all metaphysical consolation to the devil—and
then away with metaphysics! Or, to speak the language of that
Dionysian fiend called Zarathustra:14
“Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And for my sake
don’t forget your legs as well! Raise up your legs, you fine dancers, and
better yet, stand on your heads!”
“This crown of the man who laughs, this crown wreathed with
roses—I have placed this crown upon myself. I myself declare my laughter holy.
Today I found no one else strong enough for that.”
“Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light hearted, who
beckons with his wings, a man ready to fly, hailing all birds, prepared and
ready, a careless and blessed man.”—
“Zarathustra the truth-teller, Zarathustra the true laugher, not
an impatient man, not a man of absolutes, someone who loves jumps and leaps to
the side—I myself crown myself!”
“This crown of the laughing man, this crown of rose wreaths: you
my brothers, I throw this crown to you! Laughter I declare sacred: you higher
men, for my sake learn— to laugh!”
Sils-Maria, Upper Engadine
August 1886
In order to keep far away from me all possible disturbances,
agitation, and misunderstandings which the assembly of ideas in this piece of
writing will bring about on account of the peculiar character of our aesthetic
public, and also to be capable of writing a word of introduction to the book
with the same contemplative joy which marks every page, the crystallization of
good inspirational hours, I am imagining to myself the look with which you, my
esteemed friend, will receive this work—how you, perhaps after an evening
stroll in the winter snow, look at the unbound Prometheus on the title page,
read my name, and are immediately convinced that, no matter what this text consists
of, the writer has something serious and urgent to say, and that, in addition,
in everything which he composed, he was conversing with you as with someone present
and could write down only what was appropriate to such a presence. In this
connection, you will remember that I gathered these ideas together at the same
time that your marvellous commemorative volume on Beethoven appeared,
that is, during the terror and grandeur of the war which had just broken out.
Nevertheless, people would be wrong if this collection made them think of the
contrast between patriotic excitement and aesthetic rapture, between a brave
seriousness and a cheerful game. By actually reading this text, they should
instead be astonished to recognize clearly the serious German problem which we
have to deal with, the problem which we really placed right in the middle of German
hopes, as its vortex and turning point. However, it will perhaps be generally
offensive for these same people to see an aesthetic problem taken so seriously,
if, that is, they are incapable of seeing art as anything more than a merry
diversion, an easily dispensable bell-ringing in comparison with the
“Seriousness of Existence,” as if no one understood what was involved in this
contrast with such “Seriousness of Existence.” For these earnest readers, let
this serve as a caution: I am convinced that art is the highest task and the
essential metaphysical capability of this life, in the sense of that man to
whom I here, as to my sublime pioneer on this path, wish this writing to be
dedicated.
Basel, End of the Year 1871
1
We will have achieved much for scientific study of aesthetics when
we come, not merely to a logical understanding, but also to the certain and immediate
apprehension of the fact that the further development of art is bound up with
the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian,
just as reproduction similarly depends upon the duality of the sexes, their
continuing strife and only periodically occurring reconciliation. We take these
names from the Greeks, who gave a clear voice to the profound secret teachings
of their contemplative art, not in ideas, but in the powerfully clear forms of
their divine world. With those two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we
establish our recognition that in the Greek world there exists a huge contrast,
in origin and purposes, between the visual arts, the
Apollonian, and the non-visual art of music, the Dionysian.15 These
two very different drives go hand in hand, for the most part in open conflict
with each other and simultaneously provoking each other all the time to new and
more powerful offspring, in order to perpetuate in them the contest of that
opposition, which the common word “Art” only seems to bridge, until at last,
through a marvellous metaphysical act of the Greek “will,” they
appear paired up with each other and, as this pair, finally produce Attic
tragedy, as much a Dionysian as an Apollonian work of art.
In order to bring those two drives closer to us, let us think of
them first as the separate artistic worlds of dream and
of intoxication, physiological phenomena between which we can
observe an opposition corresponding to the one between the Apollonian and the
Dionysian. According to the idea of Lucretius, the marvellous divine
shapes first stepped out before the mind of man in a dream.16 It
was in a dream that the great artist saw the delightful anatomy of superhuman
existence, and the Greek poet, questioned about the secrets of poetic
creativity, would have also recalled his dreams and given an
explanation similar to the one Hans Sachs provides in Die Meistersinger.17
My friend, that is precisely the poet’s work—
To figure out his dreams, mark them down.
Believe me, the truest illusion of mankind
Is revealed to him in dreams:
All poetic art and poeticizing
Is nothing but interpreting true dreams.
The beautiful appearance of the world of dreams, in whose creation
each man is a complete artist, is the precondition of all plastic art, and
also, in fact, as we shall see, an important part of poetry. We enjoy the form
with an immediate understanding; every shape speaks to us; nothing is
indifferent and unnecessary. For all the most intense life of this dream
reality, we nevertheless have the shimmering sense of their illusory
quality: That, at least, is my experience. For the frequency, indeed
normality, of this response, I could point to many witnesses and the utterances
of poets. Even the philosophical man has the presentiment that under this
reality in which we live and have our being lies hidden a second, totally
different reality and that thus the former is an illusion. And Schopenhauer
specifically designates as the trademark of philosophical talent the ability to
recognize at certain times that human beings and all things are mere phantoms
or dream pictures. Now, just as the philosopher behaves in relation to the
reality of existence, so the artistically excitable man behaves in relation to
the reality of dreams: he looks at them precisely and with pleasure, for from
these pictures he fashions his interpretation of life; from these events he
rehearses his life for himself. This
is not merely a case of the agreeable and friendly images which he experiences
in himself with a complete understanding; they also include what is serious,
cloudy, sad, dark, sudden scruples, teasing accidents, nervous expectations, in
short, the entire “divine comedy” of life, including the Inferno—all this moves
past him, not just like a shadow play—for he lives and suffers in the midst of
these scenes—and yet also not without that fleeting sense of illusion. And
perhaps several people remember, like me, amid the dangers and terrors of a
dream, successfully cheering themselves up by shouting: “It is a dream! I want
to dream it some more!” I have also heard accounts of some people who had the
ability to set out the causality of one and the same dream over three or more
consecutive nights. These facts are clear evidence showing that our innermost beings, the secret underground in all of us, experiences its
dreams with deep enjoyment and a sense of delightful necessity.
In the same manner the Greeks expressed this joyful necessity of
the dream experience in their Apollo. Apollo, as the god of all the plastic
arts, is at the same time the god of prophecy. In accordance with the root
meaning of his association with “brightness,” he is the god of light; he also
rules over the beautiful appearance of the inner fantasy world. The higher
truth, the perfection of this condition in contrast to the sketchy
understanding of our daily reality, as well as the deep consciousness of a
healing and helping nature in sleep and dreaming, is at the same time the
symbolic analogy to the capacity to prophesy the truth, as well as to art in
general, through which life is made possible and worth living. But also that
delicate line which the dream image may not cross so that it does not work its
effect pathologically— otherwise the illusion would deceive us as crude
reality—that line must not be absent from the image of Apollo, that boundary of
moderation, that freedom from more ecstatic excitement, that fully wise calm of
the god of images. His eye must be “sun-like,” in keeping with his origin; even
when he is angry and gazes with displeasure, the consecration of the beautiful
illusion rests on him. And so concerning Apollo one could endorse, in an
eccentric way, what Schopenhauer says of the man trapped in the veil of Maja: “As on the stormy sea which extends without limit on
all sides, howling mountainous waves rise up and sink and a sailor sits in a
row boat, trusting the weak craft, so, in the midst of a world of torments, the
solitary man sits peacefully, supported by and trusting in the principium individuationis
[principle of individuation]” (World as Will and Idea, I.1.3).18 In
fact, we could say of Apollo that the imperturbable trust in that principle and
the calm sitting still of the man caught up in it attained its loftiest
expression in him, and we may even designate Apollo himself as the marvellous divine
image of the principium individuationis,
from whose gestures and gaze all the joy and wisdom of “illusion,” together
with its beauty, speak to us.
In the same place Schopenhauer also described for us the tremendous
awe that seizes a man when he
suddenly doubts his ways of comprehending illusion, when the principle of
reason, in any one of its forms, appears to suffer from an exception. If we add
to this awe the ecstatic rapture, which rises up out of the same collapse of
the principium individuationis from
the innermost depths of a human being, indeed, from the innermost depths of nature,
then we have a glimpse into the essence of the Dionysian, which is
presented to us most closely through the analogy to intoxication.
Either through the influence of narcotic drink, of which all primitive men and
peoples speak in their hymns, or through the powerful coming on of spring,
which drives joyfully through all of nature, that Dionysian excitement arises;
as it intensifies, the subjective fades into complete forgetfulness of self.
Even in the German Middle Ages, under the same power of Dionysus, constantly
growing hordes thronged from place to place, singing and dancing; in these St.
John’s and St. Vitus’s dances we recognize
the Bacchic chorus of the Greeks once again, with its precursors in
Asia Minor, right back to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea [riotous
Babylonian festival]. There are people who, from a lack of experience or
out of apathy, turn mockingly or pityingly away from such phenomena as from a
“sickness of the people,” with a sense of their own health. These poor people
naturally do not have any sense of how deathly and ghost-like this very
“health” of theirs sounds, when the glowing life of the Dionysian throng roars
past them.
Under the magic of the Dionysian, not only does the bond between
man and man lock itself in place once more, but also nature itself, no matter
how alienated, hostile, or subjugated, rejoices again in her festival of reconciliation
with her prodigal son, man. The earth freely offers up her gifts, and the beasts of prey from the rocks and the
desert approach in peace. The wagon of Dionysus is covered with flowers and
wreaths; under his yolk stride panthers and tigers. If someone were to
transform Beethoven’s Ode to Joy into a painting and not restrain
his imagination when millions of people sink dramatically into the dust, then
we could come close to the Dionysian. Now the slave a
free man; now all the stiff, hostile barriers break apart, those things which
necessity and arbitrary power or “saucy fashion” have established between men. Now,
with the gospel of world harmony, every man feels himself not only united with
his neighbour, reconciled and fused together, but also as one with him, as
if the veil of Maja had been ripped apart,
with only scraps fluttering around in the face of the mysterious primordial
unity. Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community:
he has forgotten how to walk and talk and is on the verge of flying up into the
air as he dances. The enchantment speaks out in his gestures. Just as the animals
now speak and the earth gives milk and honey, so something supernatural also
echoes out of him: he feels himself a god; he himself now moves in
as lofty and ecstatic a way as he saw the gods move in his dream. The man is no
longer an artist; he has become a work of art: the artistic power of all of
nature, to the highest rhapsodic satisfaction of the primordial unity, reveals
itself here in the transports of intoxication. The finest clay, the most
expensive marble—man—is here worked and hewn, and the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries
rings out to the chisel blows of the Dionysian world artist: “Do
you fall down, you millions? World, do you have a sense of your creator?”19
2
Up to this point, we have considered the Apollonian and its
opposite, the Dionysian, as artistic forces which break forth out of nature itself,
without the mediation of the human artist, and in which the human
artistic drives are for the time being satisfied directly—on the one hand, as a
world of dream images, whose perfection has no connection with an individual’s
high level of intellect or artistic education, on the other hand, as the
intoxicating reality, which once again does not respect the individual, but
even seeks to abolish the individual and to redeem him through a mystical
feeling of collective unity. In comparison to these unmediated artistic states
of nature, every artist is an “imitator,” and, in fact, is an artist either of
Apollonian dream or Dionysian intoxication or, finally—as in Greek tragedy, for
example— simultaneously an artist of intoxication and of dreams. As the last,
it is possible for us to imagine how he sinks down in Dionysian drunkenness and
mystical obliteration of the self, alone and apart from the rapturous choruses,
and how, through the Apollonian effects of dream, his own state now reveals
itself to him, that is, his unity with the innermost basis of the world, in
a metaphorical dream picture.
Having set out these general assumptions and comparisons, let us
now approach the Greeks, in order to recognize to what degree and
to what heights those artistic drives of nature were developed
in them: in that way we will be in a position to understand more deeply and to
assess the relationship of the Greek artist to his primordial images or, to use
Aristotle’s expression, his “imitation of nature.” In spite of all their
literature on dreams and numerous dream anecdotes, we can speak of the dreams of
the Greeks only hypothetically, although with a fair degree of certainty. Given
the incredibly clear and accurate plastic capability of their eyes, along with
their intelligent and open love of colour, one cannot go wrong in assuming
that, to the shame all those born later, their dreams also had a logical
causality of lines and circumferences, colours, and groupings, a sequence of
scenes rather like their best bas reliefs, whose perfection would certainly
entitle us, if such a comparison were possible, to describe the dreaming Greek
man as Homer and Homer as a dreaming Greek man, in a deeper sense than when modern
man, with respect to his dreams, has the temerity to compare himself with Shakespeare.
On the other hand, we do not need to speak merely hypothetically
when we are to expose the immense gap which separates the Dionysian Greeks
from the Dionysian barbarians. In all quarters of the ancient
world—setting aside here the newer worlds—from Rome to Babylon, we can confirm
the existence of Dionysian celebrations, of a type, at best, related to the
Greek type in much the same way as the bearded satyr, whose name and attributes
are taken from the goat, is related to Dionysus himself. Almost everywhere, the
central point of these celebrations consisted of an exuberant sexual
promiscuity, whose waves flooded over all established family practices and its
traditional laws. The very wildest bestiality of nature was here unleashed,
creating that abominable mixture of lust and cruelty, which has always seemed
to me the real “witches’ cauldron.” From the feverish excitement of those
festivals, knowledge of which reached the Greeks from all directions by land
and sea, they were, it seems, for a long time completely secure and protected
through the figure of Apollo, drawn up here in all his pride. Apollo could counter
by holding up the head of Medusa, for no power was more
dangerous than this massive and grotesque Dionysian force.20 Doric
art has immortalized that majestic bearing of Apollo as he
stands in opposition.21 This
resistance became more questionable and even impossible as similar impulses
finally broke out from the deepest roots of Hellenic culture itself: now the
effect of the Delphic god, in a timely final process of reconciliation, limited
itself to taking the destructive weapon out of the hand of the powerful
opponent. This reconciliation is the most important moment in the history of
Greek culture. Wherever we look, the revolutionary effects of this event
manifest themselves. It was the reconciliation of two opponents, who from now
on observed their differences with a sharp demarcation of the border line to be
kept between them and with occasional gifts sent to honour each
other, but basically the gap was not bridged over. However, if we see how,
under the pressure of that peace agreement, the Dionysian power revealed itself,
then we now understand the meaning of the festivals of world redemption and
days of transfiguration in the Dionysian orgies of the Greeks, in comparison
with that Babylonian Sacaea, which turned human
beings back into tigers and apes.
In these Greek festivals, for the first time nature achieves its
artistic jubilee. In them, for the first time, the tearing apart of the principii individuationis [the
principle of individuation] becomes an artistic phenomenon. Here that
dreadful witches’ cauldron of lust and cruelty was without power. The strange
mixture and ambiguity in the emotions of the Dionysian celebrant only remind
him—as healing potions remind one of deadly poison—of that phenomenon that pain
awakens joy and that the jubilation in his chest rips out cries of agony.
From the most sublime joy echoes the cry of horror or the longingly plaintive lament
over an irreparable loss. In those Greek festivals it was as if a sentimental feature
of nature is breaking out, as if nature has to sigh over her dismemberment into
separate individuals. The song and the language of gestures of such a doubly defined
celebrant was for the Homeric Greek world something new and unheard of, and in
it Dionysian music, in particular, awoke fear and terror. If music
was apparently already known as an Apollonian art, this music, strictly
speaking, was a rhythmic pattern like the sound of waves, whose artistic power
had been developed for presenting Apollonian states. The music of Apollo was
Doric architecture expressed in sound, but only in intimate
tones characteristic of the cithara.22 It kept at a careful
distance, as something un-Apollonian, the particular element which constitutes
the character of Dionysian music and, along with that, of music generally, the
emotionally disturbing tonal power, the unified stream of melody, and the totally
incomparable world of harmony. In the Dionysian dithyramb man is aroused to the
highest intensity of all his symbolic capabilities; something never felt forces
itself into expression, the destruction of the veil of Maja,
the sense of oneness as the presiding genius of form, in fact, of nature
itself. Now the essence of nature is to express itself symbolically; a new
world of symbols is necessary, the entire symbolism of the body, not just the
symbolism of the mouth, of the face, and of the words, but the full gestures of
the dance, all the limbs moving to the rhythm. And then the other symbolic powers grow, those of the music, in rhythm, dynamics, and
harmony—with sudden violence. To grasp this total unleashing of all symbolic
powers, man must already have attained that high level of freedom from the self
which desires to express itself symbolically in those forces. Because of this,
the dithyrambic servant of Dionysus will be understood only by someone like
himself! With what astonishment must the Apollonian Greek have gazed at him!
With an amazement which was all the greater as he sensed with horror that all
this might not be really so foreign to him, that, in fact, his Apollonian
consciousness was, like a veil, merely covering the Dionysian world in front of
him.
3
In order to grasp this point, we must dismantle that artistic
structure of Apollonian culture,
as it were, stone by stone, until we see the foundations on which it is built.
Here we now become aware for the first time of the marvellous Olympian divine forms, which stand on
the pediments of this building and whose actions decorate its friezes all
around in illuminating bas relief. If Apollo also stands among them as a single
god next to others and without any claim to a pre-eminent position, we should
not on that account let ourselves be deceived. The same drive which made itself
sensuously perceptible in Apollo gave birth to that entire Olympian world in
general, and, in this sense, we are entitled to value Apollo as the father of
that world. What was the immense need out of which such an illuminating society
of Olympian beings arose?
Anyone who steps up to these Olympians with another religion in
his heart and now seeks from them ethical loftiness, even sanctity,
non-physical spirituality, loving gazes filled with pity, will soon have to
turn his back despondently in disappointment with them. Here there is no
reminder of asceticism, spirituality, and duty: here speaks to us only a full,
indeed a triumphant, existence, in which everything present is worshipped, no
matter whether it is good or evil. And thus the onlooker may well stand in real
consternation in front of this fantastic excess of life, to ask himself with
what magical drink in their bodies these high-spirited men could have enjoyed
life, so that wherever they look, Helen laughs back at them, that ideal image
of their own existence, “hovering in sweet sensuousness.” However, we must call
out to this onlooker who has already turned his back: “Don’t leave them. First
listen to what Greek folk wisdom expresses about this very life which spreads
itself out here before you with such inexplicable serenity. There is an old
legend that king Midas for a long time hunted the wise Silenus, the
companion of Dionysus, in the forests, without catching him. When Silenus finally
fell into the king’s hands, the king asked what was the
best thing of all for men, the very finest. The daemon remained silent,
motionless and inflexible, until, compelled by the king, he finally broke out
into shrill laughter and said these words, “Suffering creature, born for a day,
child of accident and toil, why are you forcing me to say what would give you
the greatest pleasure not to hear? The very best thing for you is totally
unreachable: not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing.
The second best thing for you, however, is this—to die soon.”
What is the relationship between the Olympian world of the gods
and this popular wisdom? It is like the relationship of the entrancing vision
of the tortured martyr to his torments.
Now, as it were, the Olympic magic mountain reveals itself and
shows us its roots. The Greek knew and felt the terror and horrors of
existence: in order to be able to live at all, he must have placed in front of
him the gleaming dream birth of the Olympians. That immense distrust of the
titanic forces of nature, that Moira [Fate] enthroned mercilessly
above everything which could be known, that vulture of the great friend of man,
Prometheus, that fatal lot of wise Oedipus, that family curse on the House of Atreus,
which compelled Orestes to kill his mother, in short, that entire philosophy of
the woodland god, together with its mythical illustrations, from which the
melancholy Etruscans died off—that was overcome time after time by the Greeks,
or at least hidden and removed from view, through the
artistic middle world [Mittelwelt] of the Olympians.23 In
order to be able to live, the Greeks must have created these gods out of the
deepest necessity. We can readily imagine the sequential development of these
gods: through that Apollonian drive for beauty there developed, by a slow
transition out of the primordial titanic divine order of terror, the Olympian
divine order of joy, just as roses break forth out of thorny bushes. How else
could a people so emotionally sensitive, so spontaneously desiring, so
singularly capable of suffering, have been able to endure their existence,
unless the same qualities, with a loftier glory flowing round them, manifested
themselves in their gods. The same impulse which summons art into life as the
seductive replenishment for further living and the completion of existence also
gave rise to the Olympian world, in which the Hellenic “Will” held before
itself a transfiguring mirror. In this way, the gods justify the lives of men,
because they themselves live it—that is the only satisfactory theodicy!
Existence under the bright sunshine of such gods is experienced as worth
striving for in itself, and the essential pain of the Homeric
men refers to separation from that sunlight, above all to the fact that such
separation is coming soon, so that people could now say of them, with a reversal
of the wisdom of Silenus, “The very worst thing for them was to die soon;
the second worst was to die at all.” When the laments resound now, they tell
once more of short-lived Achilles, of the changes in the race of men, transformed
like leaves, of the destruction of the heroic age. It is not
unworthy of the greatest hero to long to live on, even as a day labourer.24 Thus,
in the Apollonian stage, the “Will” spontaneously demands to keep on living,
the Homeric man feels himself so at one with living that even his lament
becomes a song of praise.
Here we must now point out that this harmony, looked on with such
longing by more recent men, in fact, that unity of man with nature, for which
Schiller coined the artistic slogan “naive,” is in no way such a simple,
inevitable, and, as it were, unavoidable condition, like a human paradise,
which we necessarily run into at the
door of every culture: such a belief is possible only in an age which seeks to
believe that Rousseau’s Emile is also an artist and which imagines it has found in Homer an artist like Emile raised in the bosom of nature.25 Wherever
we encounter the “naive” in art, we have to recognize the highest effect of
Apollonian culture, which always first has to overthrow the kingdom of the
Titans and to kill monsters and, through powerfully deluding images and joyful
illusions, has to emerge victorious over the horrific depth of what we observe
in the world and the most sensitive capacity for suffering. But how seldom does
the naive, that sense of being completely swallowed up in the beauty of
appearance, succeed! For that reason, how inexpressibly noble is Homer,
who, as a single individual, was related to that Apollonian popular culture as
the individual dream artist is to the people’s capacity to dream and to nature
in general. Homeric “naïveté” is only to be understood as the complete victory
of the Apollonian illusion. It is the sort of illusion which nature uses so
frequently in order to attain her objectives. The true goal is concealed by a
deluding image: we stretch our hands out toward this image, and nature reaches
its goal through our deception. With the Greeks the “Will” wished to gaze upon
itself through the transforming power of genius and the world of art; in order
to glorify itself, its creatures had to sense that they themselves were worthy
of being glorified; they had to see themselves again in a higher sphere,
without this complete world of contemplation affecting them as an imperative or
as a reproach. This is the sphere of beauty, in which they saw their mirror
images, the Olympians. With this mirror of beauty, the Hellenic “Will” fought
against the talent for suffering, which is bound up with artistic talent, and
the wisdom of suffering, and, as a memorial
of its victory, Homer stands before us, the naive artist.
4
Using the analogy of a dream, we can learn something about this
naive artist. If we recall how the dreamer, in the middle of his illusory dream
world, calls out to himself, without destroying that world, “It is a dream. I
want to continue dreaming it,” and if we can infer from that, on the one hand,
that he has a deep inner delight at the contemplation of the dream, and, on the
other, that he must have completely forgotten the day and its terrible demands,
in order to be capable of dreaming at all with this inner joy at contemplation,
then we may interpret all these phenomena, with the guidance of Apollo, the
interpreter of dreams, in something like the manner which follows. To be sure,
with respect to both halves of life, the waking and the dreaming parts, the
first one strikes us as disproportionately more privileged, more important,
more valuable, more worth living, in fact, the only part which is lived;
nevertheless, I would like to assert, something of a paradox to all
appearances, for the sake of that secret foundation of our essence, whose
manifestation we are, precisely the opposite evaluation of dreams. For the more
I become aware of those all-powerful natural artistic impulses and the fervent
yearning for illusion contained in them, the desire to be redeemed through
appearances, the more I feel myself pushed to the metaphysical assumption that
the true being and the primordial oneness, ever-suffering and entirely
contradictory, constantly uses the delightful vision, the joyful illusion, to
redeem itself; we are compelled to experience this illusion, totally caught up
in it and constituted by it, as the truly non-existent, that is, as a
continuous development in time, space, and causality, in other words, as
empirical reality. But if we momentarily look away from our own “reality,” if
we grasp our empirical existence and the world in general as an idea of the
primordial oneness created in every moment, then we must now consider our dream
as the illusion of an illusion, as well as an even higher fulfillment of
the original hunger for illusion. For this same reason, the innermost core of
nature takes that indescribable joy in the naive artist and naive work of art,
which is, in the same way, only “an illusion of an illusion.”
Raphael, himself one of those
immortal “naive” men, has presented in an allegorical painting that reduction
of an illusion into an illusion, the fundamental process of the
naive artist and Apollonian culture as well.26 In
his Transfiguration the bottom half
shows us, with the possessed boy, the despairing porters, the helplessly
frightened disciples, the mirror image of the eternal primordial pain, the sole
basis of the world. The “illusion” here is the reflection of the eternal
contradiction, of the father of things. Now, out of this illusion there rises
up, like an ambrosial fragrance, a new world of illusion, like a vision, invisible
to those trapped in the first scene—something illuminating and hovering in the
purest painless ecstasy, a shining vision to contemplate with eyes wide open.
Here we have before our eyes, in the highest symbolism of art, that Apollonian
world of beauty and its foundation, the frightening wisdom of Silenus, and
we understand, through intuition, their reciprocal necessity. But Apollo
confronts us once again as the divine manifestation of the principii individu-ationis,
the only thing through which the eternally attained goal of the primordial
oneness, its redemption through illusion, takes place: he shows us, with
awe-inspiring gestures, how the entire world of torment is necessary, so that
through it the individual is pushed to the creation of the redemptive vision
and then, absorbed in contemplation of that vision, sits quietly in his
rowboat, tossing around in the middle of the ocean.
This deification of individuation, if it is thought of in general
as commanding and proscriptive, understands only one law, the individual, that is, observing the limits of individualization, moderation in
the Greek sense. Apollo, as an ethical divinity, demands moderation from his followers
and, so that they can observe self-control, a knowledge of
the self. And so alongside the aesthetic necessity of beauty run the demands “Know
thyself” and “Nothing too much!”; whereas, arrogance and excess are considered
the essentially hostile daemons belonging to the non-Apollonian sphere, and
therefore characteristics of the pre-Apollonian period, the age of the Titans, and of the world beyond the Apollonian, that is, the
barbarian world.27 Because
of his Titanic love for mankind, Prometheus had to be ripped apart by the vulture.
For the sake of his excessive wisdom, which solved the riddle of the sphinx,
Oedipus had to be overthrown in a bewildering whirlpool of
evil. That is how the Delphic god interpreted the Greek past.28
To the Apollonian Greek the effect aroused by the Dionysian also
seemed “Titanic” and “barbaric.” But he could not, with that response, conceal
that he himself was, nonetheless, at the same time also internally related to
those deposed Titans and heroes. Indeed, he must have felt even more: his
entire existence, with all its beauty and moderation, rested on a hidden
underground of suffering and knowledge, which was exposed for him again through
that very Dionysian. And look! Apollo could not live without Dionysus! The
“Titanic” and the “barbaric” were, in the end, every bit as necessary as the
Apollonian! And now let us imagine how in this world, constructed on illusion
and moderation and restrained by art, the ecstatic sound of the Dionysian
celebration rang out all around with a constantly more enticing magic, how in
these celebrations the entire excess of nature made itself
known in joy, suffering, and knowledge, even in the most piercing scream. Let
us imagine what the psalm-chanting Apollonian artist, with his ghostly harp
music could have meant in comparison to this daemonic popular singing! The
muses of the art of “illusion” withered away in the face of an art which spoke
truth in its intoxicated state: the wisdom of Silenus cried out “Woe! Woe!” against the
serene Olympians. The individual, with all his limits and moderation, was
destroyed in the self-oblivion of the Dionysian condition and forgot the
Apollonian principles.
Excess revealed itself as the truth. The contradiction, the ecstasy
born from pain, spoke of itself right out of the heart of nature. And so the
Apollonian was cancelled and destroyed everywhere the Dionysian penetrated. But
it is just as certain that in those places where the first onslaught was halted,
the high reputation and the majesty of the Delphic god manifested itself more
firmly and threateningly than ever. For I can explain the Doric state
and Doric art only as a constant Apollonian war camp: only through an
uninterrupted opposition to the Titanic-barbaric essence of the Dionysian could
such a defiantly aloof art, protected on all sides with fortifications, such a
harsh upbringing as a preparation for war, and such a cruel and
ruthless basis for government endure for a long time.29
Up to this point I have set out at some length what I observed at
the opening of this essay: how the Dionysian and the Apollonian ruled the
Hellenic world in a constantly new sequence of births, one after the other,
mutually intensifying each other; how, out of the “first” age, with its battles
against the Titans and its austere popular philosophy, the Homeric world
developed under the rule of the Apollonian drive for beauty; how this “naive”
magnificence was swallowed up once more by the breaking out of the Dionysian
torrent; and how, in opposition to this new power, the Apollonian erected the
rigid majesty of Doric art and the Doric world view. If in this way the earlier
history of the Greeks, in the struggle of those two hostile principles, falls
into four major artistic periods, we are now impelled to ask more about the
final stage of this development and striving, in case we should consider, for
example, the last attained period, the one of Doric art, the summit and intention
of those artistic impulses. Here, the lofty and highly praised artistic
achievement of Attic tragedy and of the dramatic dithyramb
presents itself before our eyes, as the common goal of both impulses, whose
secret marriage partnership, after a long antecedent struggle,
glorified itself with such a child—at once Antigone and Cassandra.30
5
We are now approaching the essential goal of our undertaking,
which aims at a knowledge of the Dionysian-Apollonian genius and its work of art,
at least at an intuitive understanding of that mysterious unity. Here now, to
begin with, we raise the question of where that new seed first manifests itself
in the Hellenic world, the seed which later develops into tragedy and the
dramatic dithyramb. On this question, classical antiquity itself gives us
illustrative evidence when it places Homer and Archilochus next to each other in paintings,
cameos, and so on, as the originators and torchbearers of Greek poetry, in full
confidence that only these two should be equally considered completely original
natures from whom a firestorm flowed out over the entire later
world of the Greeks.31 Homer,
the ancient, self-absorbed dreamer, the archetype of the naive Apollonian artist,
now stares astonished at the passionate head of wild Archilochus,
the fighting servant of the Muses, battered by existence. In its interpretative
efforts, our more recent aesthetics has known only how to indicate that here
the first “subjective” artist stands in contrast to the “objective” artist.
This interpretation is of little use to us, since we recognize the subjective
artist only as a bad artist and demand in every style of art and every high artistic
achievement, first and foremost, a victory over the subjective, redemption from
the “I,” and the silence of every individual will and desire; indeed, we are
incapable of believing the slightest artistic creation true, unless it has objectivity
and a purely disinterested contemplation. Hence, our aesthetic must first solve
that problem of how it is possible for the “lyric poet” to be an artist, for
he, according to the experience of all ages, always says “I” and sings out in
front of us the entire chromatic sequence of the sounds of his passions and desires.
This very Archilochus startles us,
alongside Homer, through the cry of his hate and scorn, through the drunken
eruptions of his desire. By doing this, is not Archilochus,
the first artist called subjective, essentially a non-artist? But then where
does that veneration come from, which the Delphic oracle itself, the centre of
“objective” art, showed to him, the poet, in very remarkable utterances.
Schiller has illuminated his own writing process for us with a
psychological observation which was inexplicable to him but which nevertheless
did not appear questionable, for he confesses that when he was in a state of
preparation, before he actually started writing, he did not have something like
a series of pictures, with a structured causality of ideas, in front of him and
inside him, but rather a musical mood (“With me, feeling at
first lacks a defined and clear object; the latter develops for the first time
later on. A certain musical emotional state comes first, and from this, with
me, the poetic idea then follows.” If we now add the most important phenomenon
of the entire ancient lyric, the union, universally acknowledged as natural,
between the lyricist and the musician, in fact,
their common identity—in comparison with which our recent lyrics look like the
image of a god without a head—then we can, on the basis of the aesthetic
metaphysics we established earlier, now account for the lyric poet in the
following manner. He has, first of all, as a Dionysian artist, become entirely
unified with the primordial oneness, with its pain and contradiction, and
produces the reflection of this primordial oneness as music, if music can with
justice be called a re-working of the world and its second casting. But now
this music becomes perceptible to him once again, as in a metaphorical
dream image, under the influence of Apollonian dreaming. That reflection,
which lacks imagery and ideas, of the original pain in the music, together with
its redemption in illusion, gives rise now to a second reflection as a
particular metaphor or illustration. The artist has already surrendered his
subjectivity in the Dionysian process; the image which now reveals to him his
unity with the heart of the world is a dream scene, which symbolizes that
original contradiction and pain, together with the primordial joy in illusion.
The “I” of the lyric poet thus echoes out of the abyss of being. What recent
aestheticians mean by his “subjectivity” is mere fantasy. When Archilochus, the first Greek lyric poet, announces his
raging love and, simultaneously, his contempt for the daughters of Lycambes, it is not his own passion which dances in front
of us in an orgiastic frenzy: we see Dionysus and the maenads; we see the intoxicated
reveler Archilochus sunk down in sleep—as Euripides describes
it for us in the Bacchae, asleep in a
high Alpine meadow in the midday sun—and now Apollo steps up to him and touches
him with his laurel. The Dionysian musical enchantment of the sleeper now, as
it were, flashes around him fiery images, lyrical poems, which are called, in
their highest form, tragedies and dramatic dithyrambs.
The plastic artist, as well as his relation, the epic poet, is
absorbed in the pure contemplation of images. The Dionysian musician totally
lacks every image and is in himself only and
entirely the original pain and original reverberation of that image. The
lyrical genius feels a world of images and metaphors grow up out of the
mysterious state of unity and of renunciation of the self. These have a colour,
causality, and speed entirely different from that world of the plastic artist
and of the writer of epic. While the last of these (the epic poet) lives in
these pictures and only in them with joyful contentment and does not get tired
of contemplating them with love, right down to the smallest details, and while
even the image of the angry Achilles is for him only a picture whose expression
of anger he enjoys with that dream joy in illusions—so that he, by this mirror
of appearances, is protected against the development of that sense of unity and
of being fused together with the forms he has created—the images of the lyric
poet are, by contrast nothing but he himself and, as it were,
only different objectifications of himself. He can say “I” because he is the
moving central point of that world; only this “I” is not the same as the “I” of
the awake, empirically real man, but the single “I” of true and eternal being
in general, the “I” resting on the foundation of things, through the portrayal
of which the lyrical genius looks right into that very basis of things. Now,
let’s imagine next how he also looks upon himself among these
likenesses, as a non-genius, that is, as his own “Subject,” the entire unruly
crowd of subjective passions and striving of his will aiming at something
particular, which seems real to him. If it now appears as if the lyrical genius
and the non-genius bound up with him were one and the same and as if the first
of these spoke that little word “I” about himself, then this illusion could now
no longer deceive us, not at least in the way it deceived those who have
defined the lyricist as a subjective poet. To tell the truth, Archilochus, the man of passionately burning love and hate,
is only a vision of the genius who is by this time no longer Archilochus but a world genius and who expresses his
primordial pain symbolically in Archilochus as a
metaphor for man; whereas, that subjectively willing and desiring man Archilochus can generally never ever be a poet. It is
not at all essential that the lyric poet see directly in front of him only the
phenomenon of the man Archilochus as a
reflection of eternal being, and tragedy shows how far the visionary world of
the lyric poet can distance itself from that phenomenon clearly standing near
at hand.
Schopenhauer, who did not hide from the difficulty which the
lyric poet creates for the philosophical observation of art, believed that he
had discovered a solution, something which I cannot go along with, when in his
profound metaphysics of music he alone found a way of setting that difficulty
decisively to one side, as I believe I have done here, in his spirit and with
due honour to him. For the sake of comparison, here is how he
describes the essential nature of song:
“The consciousness of the singer is filled with the subject of
willing, that is, his own willing, often as an unleashed satisfied willing
(joy), but also, and more often, as a restricted willing (sorrow), always as
emotion, passion, a turbulent state of feeling. However, alongside this
condition and simultaneous with it, the singer, through a glimpse at the
surrounding nature, becomes aware of himself as a subject of pure, will-less
knowledge, whose imperturbable, blessed tranquilly now enters in contrast to
the pressure of his always hindered, always still limited willing: the
sensation of this contrast, this game back and forth, is basically what
expresses itself in the totality of the song and what, in general, creates the
lyrical state. In this condition, pure understanding, as it were, comes to us,
to save us from willing and the pressure of willing; we follow along, but only
moment by moment: the will, the memory of our personal goals, constantly
removes this calm contemplation from us, but over and over again the next
beautiful setting, in which pure will-less knowledge presents itself to us once
again, entices us away from willing. Hence, in the song and the
lyrical mood, willing (the personal interest in purposes) and pure
contemplation of the setting which reveals itself are miraculously mixed up
together: we seek and imagine relationships between them both; the subjective
mood, the emotional state of the will, communicates with the surroundings we
contemplate, and the latter, in turn, give their colour to our mood,
in a reflex action. The true song is the expression of this entire emotional
condition, mixed and divided in this way” (World as Will and Idea, I.3.51)
Who can fail to recognize in this description that here the lyric
has been characterized as an incompletely realized art, a leap, as it were,
which seldom attains its goal, indeed, as a semi-art, whose essence is
to consist of the fact that the will and pure contemplation, that is, the
unaesthetic and the aesthetic conditions, must be miraculously mixed up
together? In contrast to this, we maintain that the entire opposition of the
subjective and the objective, which even Schopenhauer still uses as a measurement
of value to classify art, has generally no place in aesthetics, since the
subject, the willing individual demanding his own egotistical purposes, can
only be thought of as an enemy of art, not as its origin. But insofar as the
subject is an artist, he is already released from his individual willing and
has become, so to speak, a medium, through which a subject of true being
celebrates its redemption in illusion. For we need to be clear on this point,
above everything else, to our humiliation and ennoblement: the
entire comedy of art does not present itself for us in order
to make us, for example, better or to educate us, even less because we are the
actual creators of that art world. We are, however, entitled to assume this
about ourselves: for the true creator of that world we are already pictures and
artistic projections and in the meaning of works of art we have our highest
dignity —for only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and
the world eternally justified—while, of course, our consciousness
of our own significance is scarcely any different from the consciousness which
soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle portrayed there. Hence our entire
knowledge of art is basically completely illusory, because, as knowing people,
we are not one with and identical to that being who, as the single creator and
spectator of that comedy of art, prepares for itself an eternal enjoyment. Only
to the extent that the genius in the act of artistic creation is fused with
that primordial artist of the world does he know anything about the eternal
nature of art, for in that state he is, in a miraculous way, like the weird
picture of fairy tales, which can turn its eyes and contemplate itself. Now he
is simultaneously subject and object, simultaneously
poet, actor, and spectator.
6
With respect to Archilochus,
learned scholarship has revealed that he introduced the folk song into
literature and that, because of this achievement, he earned that individual
place next to Homer in the universal estimation of the Greeks. But what is the
folk song in comparison to the completely Apollonian epic poem? What else but the perpetuum vestigum [the eternal mark] of a union
between the Apollonian and the Dionysian; its tremendous expansion, extending
to all peoples and constantly increasing with new births, testifies to us how
strong that artistic double drive of nature is, which leaves its trace behind
in the folk song, just as, in an analogous manner, the orgiastic movements of a
people leave their mark in its music. In fact, there must also have been historical
evidence to show how every period richly productive of folk songs at the same
time has been stirred in the most powerful manner by Dionysian currents,
something which we have to recognize always as the foundation and precondition
of folk song.
But to begin with, we must view the folk song as the musical
mirror of the world, as the primordial melody, which now seeks for a parallel
dream image of itself and expresses this in poetry. The melody is thus
the primary and universal fact, for which reason it can in itself undergo
many objectifications, in several texts. It is also far more important and more
essential in the naive evaluations of the people. Melody gives birth to poetry
from itself, over and over again. That is what the strophic form of the
folk song indicates to us. I always observed this phenomenon with
astonishment, until I finally came up with this explanation. Whoever looks at a
collection of folk songs, for example, Des
Knaben Wunderhorn
[The Boy’s Magic Horn] with this theory in mind will find
countless examples of how the continually fecund melody emits fiery showers of
images around itself. These images, with their bright colours, their
sudden alteration, indeed, their wild momentum, reveal a power completely
foreign to the epic illusion and its calm forward progress. From the point of
view of epic this uneven and irregular world of images in the lyric is easy to
condemn—something no doubt the solemn epic rhapsodists of the Apollonian
celebrations did in the age of Terpander.32
Thus, in the poetry of the folk song we see language most strongly
pressured to imitate music. Hence, with Archilochus a
new world of poetry begins, something which
conflicts in the most profound and fundamental way with the Homeric world. Here
we have demonstrated the one possible relationship between poetry and music,
word, and tone: the word, the image, the idea look for an analogous expression
in music and now experience the inherent power of music. In this sense we can
distinguish two main streams in the history of the language of the Greek
people, corresponding to language which imitates appearance and images or
language which imitates the world of music. Now, let’s think for a moment more
deeply about the linguistic difference in colour, syntactic structure, and
vocabulary between Homer and Pindar in order to grasp the significance
of this contrast.33 Indeed,
in this way it will become crystal clear to us that between Homer and Pindar
the orgiastic flute melodies of Olympus must have rung out, which
even in the time of Aristotle, in the
midst of a music infinitely more sophisticated, drove people into raptures of
drunken enthusiasm and with their primordial effect certainly stimulated all
the poetical forms of expression of contemporaries to imitate them. I recall
here a well-known phenomenon of our own times, something which strikes our
aestheticians as merely objectionable. Again and again we experience
how a Beethoven symphony makes it necessary for the individual listener to talk
in images, even if it is also true that the collection of different worlds of
imagery created by a musical piece really looks fantastically confused, indeed,
contradictory. In the art of those aestheticians the proper thing to do is to exercise
their poor wits on such collections and yet to overlook the phenomenon which is
really worth explaining. In fact, even when the tone poet has spoken in images
about a composition, for example, when he describes a symphony as a pastoral
and one movement as “A Scene by the Brook,” another as “A Frolicking Gathering
of Peasants,” these expressions are similarly only metaphors, images born out
of the music—and not some objective condition imitated by the music—ideas which
cannot teach us anything at all about the Dionysian
content of the music and which, in fact, have no exclusive value alongside other
pictures. Now, we have only to transfer this process of unloading music into
pictures to a youthful, linguistically creative crowd of people in order
to sense how the strophic folk song arises and how the entire linguistic
capability is stimulated by the new principle of imitating music.
If we are thus entitled to consider the lyrical poem as the
mimetic efflorescence of music in pictures and ideas, then we can now ask the
following question: “What does music look like in the mirror
of imagery and ideas?” It appears as the will, taking that word in
Schopenhauer’s sense, that is, as the opposite to the aesthetic, purely
contemplative, will-less state. Here we must now differentiate as sharply as
possible the idea of being from the idea of appearance: it is impossible for
music, given its nature, to be the will, because if that were the case we would
have to ban music entirely from the realm of art—for the will consists of what
is inherently unaesthetic—but music appears as the will. For in order to
express that appearance in images, the lyric poet needs all the excitements of
passion, from the whispers of affection right up to the ravings of lunacy.
Under the impulse to speak of music in Apollonian metaphors, he understands all
nature and himself in nature only as eternal willing,
desiring, yearning. However, insofar as he interprets music in images, he himself
is resting in the still tranquillity of the sea of Apollonian observation,
no matter how much everything which he contemplates through that medium of
music is moving around him, pushing and driving. Indeed, if he looks at himself
through that same medium, his own image reveals itself to him in a state of
emotional dissatisfaction: his own willing, yearning, groaning, cheering are
for him a metaphor with which he interprets the music for himself. This is the phenomenon of the lyric poet: as an
Apollonian genius, he interprets the music through the image of the will, while he himself, fully released from the greed of the
will, is a pure, untroubled eye of the sun.
This entire discussion firmly maintains that the lyric is just as
dependent on the spirit of music as is music itself. In its fully absolute
power, music does not need image and idea, but only tolerates them
as something additional to itself. The poetry of the lyricist can express
nothing which was not already latent in the most immense universality and
validity of the music, which forces him to speak in images. The world symbolism
of music for this very reason cannot in any way be exhausted by or reduced to
language, because music addresses itself symbolically to the primordial
contradiction and pain in the heart of the original oneness, and thus presents
in symbolic form a sphere which is above all appearances and prior to them. In
comparison with music, each appearance is far more a mere metaphor:
hence, language, as voice and symbol of appearances, can never ever
convert the deepest core of music to something external, but always remains, as
long as it involves itself with the imitation of music, only in superficial
contact with the music. The full eloquence of lyric poetry cannot bring us one
step closer to the deepest meaning of music.
7
We must now seek assistance from all the artistic principles laid
out above, in order to find our way correctly through the labyrinth, a
descriptive term we have to use to designate the origin of Greek
tragedy. I do not think I am saying anything illogical when I
claim that the problem of this origin still has not once been
seriously formulated up to now, let alone solved, no matter how frequently the
scattered scraps of ancient tradition have already been combined with one
another and then torn apart once more. This tradition tells us very
emphatically that tragedy developed out of the tragic chorus and
originally consisted only of a chorus and nothing else. This fact requires us
to look into the heart of this tragic chorus as the essential original drama,
without allowing ourselves to be satisfied at all with the common ways of talking
about art—that the chorus is the ideal spectator or had the job of standing in
for the people over against the royal area of the scene. That last mentioned
point, a conceptual explanation which sounds so lofty for many politicians—as
though the invariable moral law was presented by the democratic Athenians in the people’s
chorus, which was always proved right in matters dealing with the kings’ passionate
acts of violence and excess—may well have been suggested by a word from
Aristotle. But such an idea has no influence on the original formation of
tragedy, since all the opposition between people and ruler and every political-social
issue in general is excluded from those purely religious origins. But looking
back on the classical form of the chorus known to us in Aeschylus and Sophocles
we might also consider it blasphemous to talk here of a premonition of a
“constitutional popular representation.” Others have not been deterred from
this blasphemous assertion. The ancient political organizations of the state had
no knowledge in praxi [in practice] of
a constitutional popular representation, and, in addition, they never once had
a hopeful “premonition” of such things in their tragedies.
Much more famous than this political explanation
of the chorus is A. W. Schlegel’s idea.34 He recommended that
we consider the chorus to some extent as the quintessence and embodiment of the
crowd of onlookers, as the “ideal spectator.” This view, combined with the
historical tradition that originally the tragedy consisted entirely of the chorus,
reveals itself for what it is, a crude and unscholarly, although dazzling,
claim. But its glitter survives only in the compact form of the expression,
from the truly German prejudice for everything which is called “ideal,” and
from our momentary astonishment. For we are astonished, as soon as we compare
the theatre public we know well with that chorus and ask ourselves whether it
would be at all possible on the basis of this public ever to derive some
idealization analogous to the tragic chorus. We tacitly deny this and are now
surprised by the audacity of Schlegel’s claim, as well as by the totally
different nature of the Greek general public. For we had always thought that
the proper spectator, whoever he might be, must always remain conscious that he
has a work of art in front of him, not an empirical reality; whereas, the
tragic chorus of the Greeks is required to recognize the shapes on the stage as
living, existing people. The chorus of Oceanids really
believes that they see the Titan Prometheus in front of them and consider
themselves every bit as real as the god of the scene. And was that supposed to
be the highest and purest type of spectator, a person who, like the Oceanids, considers Prometheus vitally alive and real?
Would it be a mark of the ideal spectator to run up onto the stage and free the
god from his torment? We had believed in an aesthetic public and considered the
individual spectator all the more capable, the more he was in a position to
take the work of art as art, that is, aesthetically, and now this saying of
Schlegel’s indicates to us that the completely ideal spectator lets the scenic
world work on him, not aesthetically at all, but vitally and empirically. “O
these Greeks!” we sigh, “they are knocking over our aesthetics!” But once we
get familiar with the idea, we repeat Schlegel’s saying every time we talk
about the chorus.
But that emphatic tradition speaks here against Schlegel: the
chorus in itself, without the stage, that is, the
primitive form of tragedy, and that chorus of ideal spectators are not
compatible. What sort of artistic style would there be which one might derive
from the idea of the spectator, for which one might consider the “spectator in
himself” the essential form? The spectator without a play is a contradictory
idea. We suspect that the birth of tragedy cannot be explained either from the
high estimation of the moral intelligence of the masses or from the idea of the
spectator without a play, and we consider this problem too profound even to be
touched upon by such superficial styles of commentary.
Schiller has already provided an infinitely more valuable insight
into the meaning of the chorus in the famous preface to the Bride from
Messina, which sees the chorus as a living wall which tragedy draws around itself in order to separate itself cleanly from the real world and to protect its ideal space and its poetical
freedom for itself.35
With this as his main weapon Schiller fought against the common
idea of naturalism, against the common demand for illusion in dramatic poetry.
While in the theatre the day itself might be only artistic and stage
architecture only symbolic, and the metrical language might have an ideal
quality, on the whole, a misconception still ruled: it was not enough, Schiller
claimed, that people merely tolerated as poetic freedom what, by contrast, was
the essence of all poetry. The introduction of the chorus was the decisive step
with which war was declared openly and honourably against every naturalism in art. Such a way of looking
at things is the one, it strikes me, for which our age, which considers itself so superior, uses the dismissive catch phrase
“pseudo-idealism.” But I rather suspect that with our present worship of
naturalism and realism we are situated at the opposite pole from all idealism,
namely, in the region of a wax works collection. In that, too, there is an art,
as in certain popular romance novels of the present time. Only let no one
pester us with the claim that the “pseudo-idealism” of Schiller and Goethe has
been overcome with this art.
Of course, it is an “ideal” stage on which, according to
Schiller’s correct insight, the Greek satyr chorus, the chorus of the primitive
tragedy, customarily strolled, a stage lifted high over the real strolling
stage of mortal men. For this chorus the Greeks constructed a suspended
scaffolding of an imaginary state of nature and on it placed
imaginary natural beings. Tragedy grew up out of this foundation and,
for that very reason, has, from its inception, been spared the embarrassing
business of counterfeiting reality. That is not to say, however, that it is a
world arbitrarily fantasized somewhere between heaven and earth. It is much
rather a world possessing the same reality and credibility as the world of
Olympus, together with its inhabitants, had for the devout Greek. The satyr, as
the Dionysian chorus member, lives in a reality granted by religion and
sanctioned by myth and ritual. The fact that tragedy begins with him, that out
of him the Dionysian wisdom of tragedy speaks, is a phenomenon as foreign to us
here as the development of tragedy out of the chorus generally. Perhaps we can
reach a starting point for this discussion when I offer the claim that the
satyr himself, the imaginary natural being, is related to the cultural person
in the same way that Dionysian music is related to civilization. On this last
point Richard Wagner states that civilization is neutralized by music in the
same way light from a lamp is neutralized by daylight. In just such a manner, I
believe, the cultured Greek felt himself neutralized by the sight of the chorus
of satyrs, and the next effect of Dionysian tragedy is that the state and society,
in general the gap between man and man, give way to an invincible feeling of
unity, which leads back to the heart of nature. The metaphysical consolation
with which, as I am immediately indicating here, every true tragedy leaves us,
that, in spite of all the transformations in phenomena, at the bottom of everything
life is indestructibly powerful and delightful, this consolation appears in
lively clarity as the chorus of satyrs, as the chorus of natural beings, who
live, so to speak, indestructibly behind all civilization, and who, in spite of
all the changes in generations and a people’s history, always remain the same.
With this chorus, the profound Greek, uniquely capable of the most
delicate and the most severe suffering, consoled himself, the man who looked
around with a daring gaze in the middle of the terrifying destructive instincts
of so-called world history and equally into the cruelty of nature and who is in
danger of longing for a Buddhist denial of the will. Art saves him, and through
art life saves him.
The ecstasy of the Dionysian state, with its obliteration of the
customary manacles and boundaries of existence, contains, of course, for as
long as it lasts a lethargic element, in which everything personally
experienced in the past is immersed. Because of this gulf of oblivion, the
world of everyday reality and the world of Dionysian reality separate from each
other. But as soon as that daily reality comes back again into consciousness,
one feels it as something disgusting. The fruit of that state is an ascetic
condition, in which one denies the power of the will. In this sense the
Dionysian man has similarities to Hamlet: both have had a real glimpse into the
essence of things. They have understood,
and it disgusts them to act, for their action can change nothing in the eternal
nature of things. They perceive as ridiculous or humiliating the fact that they
are expected to set right again a world which is out of joint. The knowledge
kills action, for action requires a state of being in which we are covered with
the veil of illusion—that is what Hamlet has to teach us, not that really venal
wisdom about John-a-Dreams, who cannot move himself to act because of too much
reflection, because of an excess of possibilities, so to speak. It’s not a case
of reflection. No!—the true knowledge, the glimpse into the cruel truth
overcomes every driving motive to act, both in Hamlet as well as in the
Dionysian man. Now no consolation has any effect any more. His longing goes out
over a world, even beyond the gods themselves, toward death. Existence is
denied, together with its blazing reflection in the gods or in an immortal afterlife.
In the consciousness of once having glimpsed the truth, the man now sees
everywhere only the horror or absurdity of being; now he understands the
symbolism in the fate of Ophelia; now he recognizes the wisdom
of the forest god Silenus. It disgusts him.
Here, at a point when the will is in the highest danger, art approaches,
as a saving, healing magician. Art alone can turn those thoughts of
disgust at the horror or absurdity of existence into imaginary constructs which
permit living to continue. These constructs are the Sublime as
the artistic mastering of the horrible and the Comic as the artistic
release from disgust at the absurd. The chorus of satyrs of the dithyramb is
the saving fact of Greek art. Those emotional moods I have just described play
themselves out in the middle world of these Dionysian attendants.
8
The satyr as well as the idyllic shepherd of our more recent times
are both the epitomes of a longing directed toward the primordial and natural,
but with what a firm, fearless grip the Greek held onto his man from the woods,
and how timidly and weakly modern man toys with the flattering image of a delicate
and gentle flute-playing shepherd! Nature on which no knowledge had yet worked,
in which the walls of culture had still not been thrown up—that’s what the
Greek saw in his satyr, and so he did not yet mistake him for an ape. Quite the
contrary: the satyr was the primordial image of man, the expression of his
highest and strongest emotions, as an inspired reveller,
enraptured by the approach of the god, as a sympathetic companion, in whom the
suffering of the god was repeated, as a messenger bringing wisdom from the
deepest heart of nature, as a perceptible image of the sexual omnipotence of
nature, which the Greek was accustomed to observing with reverent astonishment.
The satyr was something sublime and divine: that’s how he must have seemed, especially
to the painfully broken gaze of the Dionysian man, who would have been insulted
by our well-groomed fictitious shepherd. His eye lingered with sublime satisfaction
on the exposed, vigorous, and magnificent script of nature; here the illusion
of culture was wiped away by the primordial image of man; here the real man
revealed himself, the bearded satyr, who cried out with joy to his god. In
comparison with him, the man of culture was reduced to a misleading caricature.
Schiller was also right about the start of tragic art: the chorus is a living
wall against the pounding reality, because it—the satyr chorus—presents existence
more genuinely, more truly, and more completely than does the civilized person,
who generally considers himself the only reality. The sphere of poetry does not
lie beyond this world as a fantastic impossibility of a poet’s brain; it wants
to be exactly the opposite, the unadorned expression of the truth, and it must
therefore simply cast off the false costume of that alleged truth of the man of
culture. The contrast between this real truth of nature and the cultural lie
which behaves as if it is the only reality is similar to the contrast between
the eternal core of things, the thing-in-itself, and the total world of
appearances. And just as tragedy, with its metaphysical
consolation, draws attention to the eternal life of that existential core in
the continuing destruction of appearances, so the symbolism of the satyr chorus
already expresses metaphorically that primordial relationship between the
thing-in-itself and appearance. That idyllic shepherd of modern man
is only a counterfeit, the totality of cultural illusions which he counts as
nature. The Dionysian Greek wants truth and nature in their highest power—he
sees himself magically changed into the satyr.
The enraptured horde of those who served Dionysus rejoiced under
such moods and insights, whose power transformed them even before their very
eyes, so that they imagined they saw themselves as restored natural geniuses,
as satyrs. The later constitution of the tragic chorus is the artistic
imitation of that natural phenomenon, in which now a division was surely
necessary between the Dionysian spectators and those under the Dionysian
enchantment. But we must always remind ourselves that the public for Attic
tragedy rediscovered itself in the chorus of the orchestra, that basically
there was no opposition between the public and the chorus: for everything is
only a huge sublime chorus of dancing and singing satyrs or of
those people who permit themselves to be represented by these satyrs.36 That
saying of Schlegel’s here must become accessible to us in a deeper sense. The
chorus is the “ideal spectator,” insofar as it is the single onlooker,
the person who sees the visionary world of the scene. A public of spectators,
as we are familiar with it, was unknown to the Greeks. In their theatre, given
the way the spectators’ space was built up in terraces of concentric
rings, it was possible for everyone quite literally to look out over the
collective cultural world around him and in that complete perspective to
imagine himself a member of the chorus. Given this insight, we can call the
chorus, in its primitive stages of the prototypical tragedy, the
self-reflection of the Dionysian man, a phenomenon which we can make out most
clearly in the experience of the actor, who, if he is really gifted, sees
perceptibly in front of him the image of the role he has to play, hovering
before his eyes, there for him to grasp. The satyr chorus is, first and
foremost, a vision of the Dionysian mass, just as, in turn, the world of the
stage area is a vision of this satyr chorus: the power of this vision is strong
enough to dull and desensitize the impression of “reality,” the sight of the
cultured people ranged in their rows of seats all around. The form of the Greek
theatre is a reminder of a solitary mountain valley: the architecture of the
scene appears as an illuminated picture of a cloud, which the Bacchae swarming
around in the mountains gaze upon from on high, as the majestic
setting in the middle of which the image of Dionysus is revealed to them.37
This primitive artistic illusion, which we are putting into words
here to explain the tragic chorus, is, from the perspective of our scholarly
views about the basic artistic process, almost offensive, although nothing can
be more obvious than that the poet is only a poet because of the fact that he
sees himself surrounded by shapes which live and act in front of him and into
whose innermost being he gazes. Through some peculiar weakness in our modern
talent, we are inclined to imagine primitive aesthetic phenomena in too
complicated and abstract a manner. For the true poet, metaphor is not a
rhetorical trope, but a representative image which really hovers in front of
him in the place of an idea. For him the character is not some totality put together
from individual traits collected bit by bit, but a living person, insistently
there before his eyes, which differs from the similar vision of the painter
only through its continued further living and acting. Why does Homer give us
descriptions so much more vivid than all the poets? Because
he sees so much more around him. We speak about poetry so
abstractly because we all tend to be poor poets. The aesthetic phenomenon is
fundamentally simple: if someone simply possesses the capacity to see a living game
going on continually and to live all the time surrounded by hordes of ghosts,
then the man is a poet; if someone simply feels the urge to change himself and
to speak out from other bodies and souls, then that person is a dramatist.
Dionysian excitement is capable of communicating this artistic
talent to an entire multitude, so that they see themselves surrounded by such a
horde of ghosts with which they know they are inwardly one. This dynamic of the
tragic chorus is the original dramatic phenomenon: to see oneself transformed before one’s eyes and now to act as
if one really had entered another body, another character. This process stands
at the beginning of the development of drama. Here is something different from
the rhapsodist, who does not fuse with his images, but, like the painter, sees
them with an observing eye outside himself; in the dramatic process there is
already a surrender of individuality by the entry into a strange nature. And,
in fact, this phenomenon breaks out like an epidemic; an entire horde feels
itself enchanted in this way. For this reason the dithyramb is essentially
different from every other choral song. The virgins who move solemnly to
Apollo’s temple with laurel branches in their hands, singing a processional
song as they go, remain who they are and retain their names as citizens. The
dithyrambic chorus is a chorus of transformed people, for whom
their civic past, their social position, is completely forgotten.38 They
have become their god’s timeless servants, living beyond all regions of
society. Every other choral lyric of the Greeks is only an immense
intensification of the Apollonian solo singer; whereas, in the dithyramb a
congregation of unconscious actors stands before us, who look upon each other
as transformed.
Enchantment is the precondition for all dramatic art. In this
enchantment the Dionysian reveller sees
himself as a satyr, and then, in turn, as a satyr he looks at his god;
that is, in his transformed state he sees a new vision outside himself as an
Apollonian fulfillment of his condition. With this new vision drama
is complete.
Keeping this knowledge in mind, we must understand Greek tragedy
as the Dionysian chorus which over and over again discharges itself in an
Apollonian world of images. Those choral passages interspersed through tragedy
are thus, as it were, the maternal womb of the entire dialogue so-called, that
is, of the totality of the stage word, the actual drama. This primordial basis
of tragedy radiates that vision of drama out in several discharges following
one after the other, a vision which is entirely a dream image and, in this
respect, epic in nature, but, on the other hand, as an objectification of a
Dionysian state, it presents not the Apollonian consolation in illusion, but,
by contrast, the smashing of individuality and becoming one with primordial
being. Thus, drama is the Apollonian embodiment of Dionysian knowledge and
effects, and, hence, is separated as if by an immense gulf from epic.
This conception of ours provides a full explanation for the chorus of
Greek tragedy, the symbol for the collectively aroused Dionysian multitude.
While we, given what we are used to with the role of the chorus on the modern
stage, especially the chorus in opera, have been totally
unable to grasp how that tragic chorus of the Greeks could be older, more
original, in fact, more important than the actual “action”—as tradition tells
us so clearly—while we, in turn, could not figure out why, given that
traditionally high importance and original pre-eminence, the chorus would
nonetheless be put together only out of lowly serving creatures, in fact, at
first only out of goat-like satyrs, and while for us the orchestra in front of
the acting area remained a constant enigma, now we have come to the insight
that the acting area, together with the action, was basically and originally
thought of only as a vision, that the single “reality” is simply
the chorus, which creates the vision out of itself and speaks of that with the
entire symbolism of dance, tone, and word. This chorus
in its vision gazes at its lord and master Dionysus and is thus
always the chorus of servants; the chorus sees how Dionysus, the
god, suffers and glorifies himself, and thus it does not itself act.
But in this role, as complete servants in relation to the god, the chorus is
nevertheless the highest, that is, the Dionysian expression of nature and, like nature, in its frenzy
speaks the language of oracular wisdom. As the sympathetic as
well as wise person, it announces the truth out of the heart
of the world. So arises that fantastic and apparently so offensive figure of
the wise and frenzied satyr, who is, at the same time, “the simple man” in
contrast to the god: an image of nature and its strongest drives, indeed, a
symbol of that and at the same time the announcer of its wisdom and art: musician,
poet, dancer, visionary in a single person.
According to this insight and to the tradition, Dionysus,
the actual stage hero and central point of the vision, was at first, in the
very oldest periods of tragedy, not really present but was only imagined as
present. That is, originally tragedy is only “chorus” and not “drama.” Later
the attempt was made to show the god as real and then to present in a way
visible to every eye the form of the vision together with the transfiguring
setting. At that point “drama” in the strict sense begins. Now the dithyrambic
chorus takes on the task of stimulating the mood of the listeners
right up to the Dionysian level, so that when the tragic hero appears on the
stage, they do not see something like an awkward masked person but a visionary
shape born, as it were, out of their own enchantment. If we imagine Admetus thinking deeply about his recently departed
wife Alcestis, completely pining away in his spiritual contemplation of her—how
suddenly is led up to him an image of a woman of similar form and similar gait,
but in disguise; if we imagine his sudden trembling agitation, his emotional
comparisons, his instinctive conviction—then we have an analogy to the
sensation with which the aroused Dionysian spectator saw striding
onto the stage the god with whose suffering he has already become one.39 Spontaneously
he transferred the whole picture of the god, magically trembling in front of
his soul, onto that masked form and dissolved the reality of that
figure, so to speak, in a ghostly unreality. This is the Apollonian dream
state, in which the world of day veils itself and a new world, clearer, more
comprehensible, more moving than the first, and yet more shadow-like, generates
itself anew in a continuing series of changes before our eyes. With this in
mind, we can recognize in tragedy a drastic contrast of styles: speech, colour,
movement, dynamics of speech appear in the Dionysian lyric of the chorus and,
on the other hand, in the Apollonian dream world of the scene as expressive
spheres completely separate from each other. The Apollonian illusions, in which
Dionysus objectifies himself, are no longer “an eternal sea, a changing weaving
motion, a glowing life,” as is the case with the music of the chorus, no longer
those powers which are only felt and cannot be turned into poetic images, moments when the frenzied servant of Dionysus feels the approach
of the god.40 Now,
from the acting area the clarity and solemnity of the epic form speak to him;
now Dionysus no longer speaks through forces but as an epic hero, almost with
the language of Homer.
9
Everything which comes to the surface in the Apollonian part of
Greek tragedy, in the dialogue, looks simple, translucent, beautiful. In this sense the dialogue is an image of the
Greek man, whose nature reveals itself in
dancing, because in dancing the greatest power is only latent, but it betrays
its presence in the lithe and rich movement. Thus, the language of the heroes
in Sophocles surprises us by its Apollonian clarity and brightness, so that we
immediately imagine that we are glimpsing the innermost basis of their being,
with some astonishment that the path to this foundation is so short. However,
once we look away from the character of the hero as it surfaces and becomes perceptible—a
character who is basically nothing more than a light picture cast onto a dark
wall, that is, an illusion through and through— we penetrate instead into the
myth which projects itself in this bright reflection. At that point we suddenly
experience a phenomenon which is the reverse of a well-known optical one. When
we make a determined attempt to look directly at the sun and turn away blinded,
we have dark-coloured specks in front of our eyes, like a remedy, as it
were. Those illuminated illusory pictures of the Sophoclean hero,
briefly put, the Apollonian mask, are the reverse of that, necessary creations
of a glimpse into the inner terror of nature, bright spots, so to speak, to
heal us from the horrifying night of the crippled gaze. Only in this sense can
we think of correctly grasping the serious and significant idea of “Greek
serenity”; whereas, nowadays we certainly come across the undoubtedly
misconceived idea that this serenity is a condition of secure contentment on
all the pathways and bridges of the present.
The most painful figure of the Greek stage, the ill-fated Oedipus,
is understood by Sophocles as the noble man who is destined for error and
misery in spite of his wisdom, but who, through his immense suffering, at the
end exerts a magically beneficial effect around him, which
still has an effect beyond his death.41 The noble man does
not sin—that’s what the profound poet wishes to tell us: through Oedipus’
actions every law, every natural principle of order, indeed, the moral world
may collapse, but because of these very actions a higher magical circle of
consequences is created, which founds a new world on the ruins of the old
world, which has been overthrown. Insofar as the poet is also a religious
thinker, that is what he wishes to say to us; as a poet, he shows us first a
wonderfully complicated legal knot, which the judge slowly undoes, link by
link, in the process destroying himself. The real
joy for the Greek in this dialectical solution is so great that because of it a
sense of powerful serenity invests the entire work, which always breaks the
sting of the dreadful assumptions of that plot. In Oedipus in Colonus we run into this same serenity, but
elevated in an immeasurable transfiguration. In contrast to the old man afflicted
with excessive suffering, a man who is exposed purely as a man suffering from everything which happens
to him—there stands the supernatural serenity which descends from the sphere of
the gods and indicates to us that the hero in his purely passive conduct
achieves his highest activity, which reaches out far over his own life;
whereas, his conscious striving in his earlier life led him only to passivity.
Thus, for the mortal eye the inextricably tangled legal knot of the Oedipus
story is slowly untangled—and the most profound human joy suffuses us with this
divine dialectical companion piece. If we have done justice to the poet with
this explanation, one can still nonetheless ask whether the content
of the myth has been exhausted in that explanation. And here we see that the
entire conception of the poet is simply nothing other than that illuminated
image which healing nature holds up before us after a glimpse into the abyss.
Oedipus the murderer of his father, the husband of his mother, Oedipus the
solver of the riddle of the sphinx! What does the secret trinity of these fatal
events tell us? There was a very ancient folk belief, especially in Persia,
that a wise magus could be born only out of incest. Looking at Oedipus as the
solver of riddles and the lover of his own mother, what we have to interpret
immediately is the fact that right there where, through prophecy and magical
powers, the spell of present and future is broken, that rigid law of individuation
and the essential magic of nature in general, an immense natural horror—in this
case incest—must have come first as the original cause. For how could we have
compelled nature to yield up her secrets, if not for the fact that we fight
back against her and win, that is, if not for the fact that we commit unnatural
actions? I see this insight stamped out in that dreadful trinity of Oedipus’s
fate: the same man who solves the riddle of nature—of that ambiguous
sphinx—must also break the most sacred natural laws when he murders his father
and marries his mother. Indeed, the myth seems to want to whisper to us that
wisdom, and especially Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural atrocity, that a man
who through his knowledge pushes nature into the abyss of destruction also has
to experience in himself the disintegration of nature. “The spear point of knowledge turns itself against the wise man. Wisdom is a crime
against nature.”42 The
myth calls out such terrible statements to us, but, like a ray of sunlight, the Greek poet touches the awe-inspiring and fearful Memnon’s Column of myth, so that it
suddenly begins to play music—Sophoclean melodies.43
Now I am going to compare the glory of passivity with the glory of
activity which illuminates Aeschylus’s Prometheus. What Aeschylus
the thinker had to say to us here, but what Aeschylus as a poet could only hint
to us through a metaphorical picture—that’s something young Goethe knew how to
reveal to us in the bold words of his Prometheus:
“Here I
sit—I make men
in my own image,
a race like me,
to suffer, to weep,
to enjoy life and rejoice,
and to ignore you,
as I do.”44
Man, rising up into something Titanic, is victorious over his own
culture and compels the gods to unite with him, because in his autonomous wisdom
he holds their existence and the limits to their authority in his hand. The
most marvellous thing in that poem of Prometheus, which is, according
to its basic ideas, essentially a hymn celebrating impiety, is, however, the
deep Aeschylean impulse for justice: the immeasurable suffering of
the brave “individual,” on the one hand, and, on the other, the peril faced by
the gods, in fact, a presentiment of a twilight of the gods, the compelling power
for a metaphysical oneness, for a reconciliation of both these worlds of suffering—all
this is a most powerful reminder of the central point and major claim of the
Aeschylean world view, which sees Moira [Fate] enthroned
over gods and men as eternal justice. In considering the astonishing daring
with which Aeschylus places the Olympian world on his scales of justice, we
must remind ourselves that the deep-thinking Greek had an unshakably firm basis
for metaphysical thinking in his mystery cults and that he could unload all his sceptical moods onto the Olympians. The Greek artist,
in particular, with respect to these divinities, felt a dark sense of reciprocal
dependency, and this sense is symbolized directly in Aeschylus’s Prometheus.
The Titanic artist discovered in himself the defiant belief that he could make
men and, at the very least, destroy Olympian gods—and he could do this through
his higher wisdom, which he, of course, was compelled to atone for with eternal
suffering. The magnificent “capability” of the great genius, for whom eternal
suffering itself is too cheap a price, the stern pride of the artist—that
is the content and soul of Aeschylean poetry; whereas, Sophocles in his Oedipus
sounds out the prelude to the victory song of the holy man. But also
that meaning which Aeschylus gave the myth does not fully measure the astonishing
depth of its terror. On the contrary, the artist’s joy in being, the serenity
of artistic creativity in spite of every impiety, is only
a light picture of cloud and sky mirrored in a dark lake of sorrow. The
Prometheus saga is a primordial possession of the Aryan population collectively
and documentary evidence of their talent for the profoundly tragic. In fact, it
could well be the case that for the Aryan being this myth has the same characteristic
significance as the myth of the Fall does
for the Semitic peoples and that both myths are related, like brother and
sister. The pre-condition of that Prometheus myth is the extraordinary value
which a naive humanity associates with fire as
the true Palladium of every rising culture.45 But
the fact that man freely controls fire and does not receive it merely as a gift
from heaven, as a blazing lightning flash or warming rays of the sun, appeared
to those contemplative primitive men as an outrage, a crime against divine
nature. And so right away the first philosophical problem posed an awkward
insoluble contradiction between man and god and pushed it, like a boulder,
right up to the door of every culture. The best and loftiest thing which
mankind can be blessed with men acquire through a crime, and now they must
accept the further consequences, namely, the entire flood of suffering and
troubles with which the offended divine presences must afflict the nobly ambitious
human race: an austere notion which, through the value which
it gives to the crime, stands in a curious contrast to the Semitic myth of the
Fall, in which curiosity, lying falsehoods, temptation, lust, in short, a
series of predominantly female emotions was looked upon as the origin of evil.
What distinguishes the Aryan conception is the lofty view of the active transgression
as the essentially Promethean virtue. With this, at the same time the ethical
basis of pessimistic tragedy is established, together with the justification of
human evils, that is, both of human guilt and of the forfeit of suffering
caused by that guilt. The impiety in the essence of things—that’s what the
thinking Aryan is not inclined to quibble away—the contradiction in the heart
of the world reveals itself to him as the interpenetration of different worlds,
for example, a divine and a human world, each of which is right individually
but which must, as one individual alongside another one, suffer for its
individuality. With this heroic push of the individual into the universal, with
this attempt to stride out over the limits of individuation and to wish to be
oneself a world being, man suffers in himself the original
contradiction hidden in things, that is, he violates the laws, and he suffers.
Just as among the Aryans crime is seen as male and among the Semites sin is
seen as female, so the original crime was also committed by a man, the original
sin by a woman. In this connection, the chorus of witches [in Goethe’s
Faust] says:
We’re not
so particular in what we say:
Woman takes a thousand steps to get her way.
But no matter how quickly she can hurry on,
With just one leap the man will get it done.
Anyone who understands that innermost core of the Prometheus saga,
namely, the imperative requirement that the individual striving like a Titan
has to fall into crime, must also sense at the same time the un-Apollonian
quality of this pessimistic idea, for Apollo wants to make individual beings
tranquil precisely because he establishes border lines between them and, with
his demands for self-knowledge and moderation, always reminds them once again
of the most sacred laws of the world. However, to prevent this Apollonian
tendency from freezing form into Egyptian stiffness and frigidity and to make
sure the movement of the entire lake does not die away through the attempt of
the Apollonian to prescribe to the individual waves their path and their
extent, from time to time the high flood of the Dionysian once again destroys
all those small circles in which the one-sided Apollonian “will” seeks to
confine the Greek spirit. Now that suddenly rising flood of the Dionysian takes
the single small wave crest of the individual on its back, just as the brother
of Prometheus, the Titan Atlas, shouldered the Earth. This Titanic impulse to
become, as it were, the Atlas of all individuals and to bear them on one’s wide
back, higher and higher, further and further, is the common
link between the Promethean and the Dionysian.46 In
this view, the Aeschylean Prometheus is a Dionysian mask, while, in
that previously mentioned deep desire for Justice Aeschylus betrays,
to the one who understands, his paternal descent from Apollo, the god of
individuation and just boundaries. And so the double nature of the Aeschylean
Prometheus, his simultaneously Dionysian and Apollonian nature, can be
expressed in an understandable formula with the following words: “Everything
present is just and unjust and equally justified in both.”
That is your world! That’s what one calls a
world!47
10
It is an incontestable tradition that Greek tragedy in its oldest
form had as its subject only the suffering of Dionysus and that for a long time
later the individually present stage heroes were simply Dionysus. But with the
same certainty we can assert that right up to the time of Euripides Dionysus
never ceased being the tragic hero, that all the famous figures of the Greek
theatre, like Prometheus, Oedipus, and so on, are only masks of
that primordial hero, Dionysus.48 The fact that behind
all these masks stands a divinity is the single fundamental
reason for the frequently admired characteristic “ideality” of those well-known
figures. Someone, I don’t know who, made the claim that all individuals, as
individuals, are comic and thus untragic, and
from that we might gather that the Greeks in general could not
tolerate individuals on the tragic stage.49 In fact, they seem to
have felt this way: that Platonic distinction between and evaluation of the
“idea” in contrast to the “idol,” to copies, in general lies
deeply grounded in the nature of the Greeks.50 But
for us to make use of Plato’s terminology, we would have to talk of the tragic
figures of the Greek stage in something like the following terms: the one truly
real Dionysus appears in a multiplicity of shapes, in the mask of a struggling
hero and, as it were, bound up in the net of the individual will. So now the
god made manifest talks and acts in such a way that he looks like an erring,
striving, and suffering individual: the fact that he generally appears with
this epic definition and clarity is the effect of Apollo, the interpreter of
dreams, who indicates to the chorus its Dionysian state by that metaphorical
appearance. In reality, however, that hero is the suffering Dionysus of the
mysteries, that god who experiences the suffering of the individual in himself,
the god about whom the amazing myths tell how he, as a child, was dismembered
by the Titans and now in this condition is venerated as Zagreus.51 Through
this is revealed the idea that this dismemberment, the essentially
Dionysian suffering, is like a transformation into air, water,
earth, and fire, that we also have to look upon the condition of individuation
as the source and basis for all suffering, as something in itself reprehensible.
From the smile of this Dionysus arose the Olympian gods, from his tears arose
mankind. In that existence as dismembered god Dionysus has the dual nature of a
cruelly savage daemon and a lenient, gentle master. The initiates in the
Eleusinian mysteries hoped for a rebirth of Dionysus, which we now can understand
as a premonition of the end of individuation: the initiates’ thundering song of
jubilation cried out to this approaching third Dionysus. And only with this
hope was there a ray of joy on the face of the fragmented world, torn apart
into individuals, as myth reveals in the picture of Demeter sunk in eternal
sorrow, who rejoices again for the first time when someone
says to her that she might be able once again to give birth to
Dionysus. In these established views we already have assembled all the components
of a profound and pessimistic world view, together with the mysterious
doctrine of tragedy: the basic acknowledgement of the unity of all existing
things, the observation that individuation is the ultimate foundation of all
evil, art the joyful hope, that the spell of individuation is there for us to
break, as a premonition of a re-established unity.—
It has been pointed out earlier that the Homeric epic is the
poetry of Olympian culture, with which it sang its own song of victory over the
terrors of the fight against the Titans. Now, under the overwhelming influence
of tragic poetry, the Homeric myths were newly reborn and show in this metamorphosis
that since then the Olympian culture has also been overcome by an even deeper
world view. The defiant Titan Prometheus reported to his Olympian torturer that
for the first time his rule was threatened by the highest danger, unless he quickly
joined forces with him. In Aeschylus we acknowledge the union of the frightened
Zeus, worried about his end, with the Titan. Thus the earlier age of the Titans is belatedly brought back from Tartarus into the
light once more.52 The
philosophy of wild and naked nature looks with the open countenance of truth at
the myths of the Homeric world dancing past it: before the flashing eyes of
this goddess, those myths grow pale and tremble—until the mighty fist of the
Dionysian artist forces them into the service of the new divinity. The
Dionysian truth takes over the entire realm of myth as the symbol of its knowledge
and speaks of this knowledge, partly in the public culture of tragedy and
partly in the secret celebrations of dramatic mystery ceremonies, but always in
the disguise of the old myths. What power was it which liberated Prometheus
from his vultures and transformed the myth into a vehicle of Dionysian wisdom?
It was the Herculean power of music, which attained its highest manifestation
in tragedy and knew how to interpret myth with a new significance in the most
profound manner, something we have already described before as the most
powerful capacity of music. For it is the lot of every myth gradually to creep
into the crevice of an assumed historical reality and to become analyzed as a
unique fact in answer to the historical demands of some later time or other.
The Greek were already fully on their way to re-labeling cleverly and arbitrarily
the completely mythical dreams of their youth as a historical, pragmatic, and youthful history.
For this is the way religions tend to die out, namely, when the mythical
pre-conditions of a religion, under the strict, rational eyes of an orthodox
dogmatism, become systematized as a closed totality of historical events and
people begin anxiously defending the credibility of their myths but resisting
every naturally continuing life and further growth of those same myths and when
the feeling for the myth dies out and in its place the claim to put religion on
a historical footing steps forward. The newly born genius of Dionysian music
now seized these dying myths, and in its hands myth blossomed again, with colours which
it had never shown before, with a scent which stirred up a longing premonition
of a metaphysical world. After this last flourishing, myth collapsed, its
leaves grew pale, and soon the mocking Lucians of antiquity grabbed
up the flowers, scattered around by all winds, colourless and
withered.53 Through
tragedy myth attains its most profound content, its most expressive form. It
lifts itself up again, like a wounded hero, and all the remaining strength and
wise tranquilly of a dying man burn in its eyes with its final powerful light.
What did you want, you presumptuous Euripides, when you sought to
force this dying man once more into your cheerful service? He died under your
powerful hands. And now you used a counterfeit, masked myth, which knew only
how to dress itself up with the old splendour, like Hercules’ monkey. And
as myth died with you, so with you died the genius of music as well. Although
you liked to plunder with greedy hands all the gardens of music, even so you
achieved only a counterfeit, masked music. And because you abandoned Dionysus,
you were then abandoned also by Apollo. Even though you hunted out all the
passions from their beds and charmed them into your circle, even though you
sharpened and filed a really sophisticated dialectic for the speeches of your
heroes—nevertheless your heroes have only counterfeit, masked passions and
speak only a counterfeit, masked dialogue.
11
Greek tragedy died in a manner different from all its ancient
sister artistic styles: it died by suicide, as a result of an insoluble, hence
tragic, conflict; whereas, all those others passed away in advanced old age
with the most beautiful and most tranquil deaths. For if it is an appropriately
happy natural condition to depart from life with beautiful descendants and
without any painful strain, then the end of those older artistic genres
manifests such a fortunate natural state of things. They disappeared slowly,
and their more beautiful offspring were already standing there before their
dying gazes, impatiently craning their heads with courageous gestures.
By contrast, with the death of Greek tragedy there was created an immense
emptiness, profoundly felt everywhere. Just as the Greek sailors at the time of
Tiberius once heard from some isolated island the shattering cry “Great Pan is
dead,” so now, like a painful lament, rang throughout the Greek world, “Tragedy
is dead! Poetry itself is lost with it! Away, away with you, you stunted, emaciated epigones! Off with you to Hades, so
that there you can for once eat your fill of the crumbs from
your former masters!”54
If now a new form of art still blossomed which paid
tribute to tragedy as its predecessor and mistress, it was looked upon with
fright, because while it certainly carried the characteristics of its mother,
they were the ones she had shown in her long death struggle. This death
struggle of tragedy was fought by Euripides, and that later art
form is known as New Attic Comedy. In it the atrophied form of
tragedy lived on, as a monument to tragedy’s extremely laborious and
violent death.
Looking at things this way, we can understand the passionate
fondness the poets of the newer comedies felt for Euripides. Thus, Philemon’s
desire to be hanged immediately merely so that he could seek out Euripides in
the underworld, provided only he could be convinced that the dead man was still
in possession of his wits, is no longer something
strange. However, if we want to state, briefly and without claiming to say
anything in detail, what Euripides has in common with Menander and with
Philemon and what worked for them so excitingly and in such an exemplary manner
in Euripides, it is enough to say that in Euripides the
spectator is brought up onto the stage.55 Anyone who has recognized the material out
of which the Promethean tragedians before Euripides created their heroes and
how remote from them lay any intention of
bringing the true mask of reality onto the stage will also see clearly the
totally deviant tendencies of Euripides. As a result of Euripides, the man of
ordinary life pushed his way out of the spectators’ space and up onto the
acting area. The mirror in which earlier only the great and bold features had
been shown now displayed that awkward fidelity which also conscientiously
reflected the unsuccessful features of nature. Odysseus, the typical Greek of
the older art, now sank in the hands of the newer poets into the figure of Graeculus,
who from now on stands right at the centre of dramatic interest
as the good-hearted, clever house slave.56 What Euripides in Aristophanes’ Frogs gives
himself credit for as a service, namely, that through his household medicines
he freed tragic art of its pompous corpulence, that point we can trace above
all in his tragic heroes. Essentially
the spectator now saw and heard his double on the Euripidean stage
and was happy that the character understood how to talk so well. But this was
not the only delight. People themselves learned from Euripides how to speak. He
praises himself on this very point in the contest with Aeschylus [in
Aristophanes’ Frogs]—how through him the people now learned to observe in
an artistic way, with the keenest sophistication, to negotiate, and to draw
conclusions. Because of this transformation in public language, he also made
the new comedy generally possible. For from that time on there was nothing
mysterious any more about how ordinary life could appear on stage and what stock
phrases [Sentenzen] it would use. Middle-class
mediocrity, on which Euripides built all his political hopes, now had its say.
Up to that point, in tragedy the demi-god and in
comedy the intoxicated satyr or semi-human had determined the nature of the language.
And so the Aristophanic Euripides [in Frogs] gave himself
high praise for how he presented common, well-known, ordinary living and
striving, which any person was capable of judging. If now the entire crowd
philosophized, administered their lands and goods with tremendous astuteness,
and carried on their own legal matters, well then, he claimed, that was to his
credit and the achievement of the wisdom which he had drummed into the people.
The new comedy could now direct its attention to such a prepared
and enlightened crowd, for whom Euripides became, to a certain extent, the
choir master. Only this time the chorus of spectators had to have practice. As
soon as this chorus was well trained to sing in the Euripidean musical
key, that style of drama like a chess game arose, the New Comedy, with its
continuing triumph of shrewdness and cunning. But Euripides, the leader of the
chorus, was incessantly praised. Indeed, people would have let themselves be
killed in order to learn even more from him, if they had not been
aware that tragic poets were just as dead as tragedy itself. With tragedy,
however, the Greeks had surrendered their faith in immortality, not merely the
faith in an ideal past, but also the faith in an ideal future. The saying from
the well-known written epitaph, “as an old man negligent and trivial” is
applicable also to the old age of Hellenism. The instantaneous, the witty, the
foolish, the capricious—these are its loftiest divinities; the fifth state, that
of the slave, or at least the feelings of a slave, now come to rule, and if in general
one is entitled still to talk of a “Greek serenity,” it is the serenity of
the slave, who has no idea how to take responsibility for anything difficult,
how to strive for anything great, how to value anything in the past or future
higher than the present. It was this appearance of “Greek serenity” which so
outraged the profound and fearful natures of the first four centuries of
Christianity; to them this feminine flight from seriousness and terror, this
cowardly self-satisfaction with comfortable consumption, seemed not only
despicable but also the essentially anti-Christian frame of mind. And to their
influence we can ascribe the fact that the view of Greek antiquity as that age
of pale rose-coloured serenity lasted for centuries and endured with almost invincible
tenacity—as if Greek antiquity had never produced a sixth century, with its
birth of tragedy, its mystery cults, its Pythagoras and Heraclitus, indeed, as
if the artistic works of the great age simply did not exist—although these
works, each and every one of them, cannot be explained at all on the grounds of
such a senile joy in existence and serenity, a mood appropriate to a slave,
these works which testify to a completely different world view
as the basis of their existence.57
Finally, when it is asserted that Euripides brought the spectator
onto the stage in order to make the spectator truly capable for the first time
of judging drama, it may appear as if the older tragic art had not resolved its
false relationship to the spectator, and people might be tempted to value the
radical tendency of Euripides to attain an appropriate relationship between the
art work and the public as a progressive step beyond Sophocles. However, the
“public” is only a word and not at all a constant, inherently firm value. Why
should an artist be duty-bound to accommodate himself to a power whose strength
is only in numbers? And if, with respect to his talent and intentions, the
artist senses that he is superior to every single one of these spectators, how
could he feel more respect for the common expression of all these capacities
inferior to his own than for the one who was, by comparison, the most highly
talented individual spectator? To tell the truth, no Greek artist handled his
public over a long lifetime with greater daring and self-satisfaction than
Euripides. As the masses hurled themselves at his feet, he himself sublimely
defied even his own characteristic tendencies and openly slapped them in the
face, those same tendencies with which he had conquered the masses. If this
genius had had the slightest reverence for the pandemonium of the public, he would
have broken apart under the cudgel blows of his failures long before the middle
of his life. If we take this into account, we see that our expression—Euripides
brought the spectator onto the stage, in order to make the spectator truly capable
of making judgments—was only provisional and that we have to seek out a deeper
understanding of his dramatic tendencies. By contrast, it is, in fact, well
known everywhere how Aeschylus and Sophocles during their lifetimes and,
indeed, well beyond that, stood in full possession of popular favour, and thus, given these predecessors of Euripides,
there is no point in talking about a misunderstanding between the art work and
the public. What drove the richly talented artist constantly under pressure to
create so powerfully away from the path above which shone the sun of the
greatest poetic names and the cloudless sky of popular approval? What curious
consideration for the spectator led him to go against the spectator? How could
he be contemptuous of his public out of a high respect for his public?
The solution to the riddle posed immediately above is this:
Euripides felt himself as a poet quite superior to the masses, but not superior
to two of his spectators. He brought the masses up onto the stage. Those two
spectators he honoured as the only judges capable of
rendering a verdict and as masters of all his art; following their instructions
and reminders, he transposed the entire world of feelings, passions, and
experiences, which up to that point had appeared in the rows of spectators as
an invisible chorus for every celebratory presentation, into the souls of his
stage heroes. Following the demands of these two judges, he also sought out for
these new characters a new language and a new tone. In the vote of these two spectators
alone he heard a valid judgment of his creation, just as he heard their
encouragement promising victory, when he saw himself once again condemned by
the justice of the general public.
The first of these two spectators is Euripides himself, Euripides the
thinker, not the poet. Of him we could say that the extraordinary richness
of his critical talent, like that of Lessing, constantly fostered,
even if it did not create, an additional productive artistic drive.58 Given
this talent, with all the clarity and agility of his critical thinking, Euripides
sat in the theatre and struggled to recognize the masterpieces of his great
predecessors, as with a painting darkened by age, feature by feature, line by
line. And here he now encountered something not unfamiliar to those who know
the profound secrets of Aeschylean tragedy: he became aware of something
incommensurable in every feature and in every line, a certain deceptive clarity
and, at the same time, an enigmatic depth, the infinity
of the background. The clearest figure still had a comet’s tail attached to it,
which seemed to hint at the unknown, the inexplicable. The same duality lay
over the construction of the drama, as well as over the meaning of the chorus.
And how ambiguously the solution of the ethical problems remained for him! How
questionable the handling of the myths! How unequal the division of luck and
disaster! Even in the language of the older tragedies there was a great deal he
found offensive or, at least, enigmatic. He especially found too much pomp and
circumstance for simple relationships, too many figures of speech and monstrosities
for straightforward characters. And thus he sat there in the theatre, full of
uneasy thoughts, and, as a spectator, he came to realize that he did not
understand his great predecessors. But since his reason counted for him as the
real root of all enjoyment and creativity, he had to question himself and look
around to see if there was anyone who thought the way he did and could in the
same way attest to that incommensurate quality of
the old drama. But the public, including the best individuals among them, met
him only with a suspicious smile. No one could explain to him why his reflections
about and objections to the great masters might be correct. And in this
agonizing condition he found the other spectator, who did not understand
tragedy and therefore did not value it. United with him, Euripides could dare
to begin emerging from his isolation to launch the immense battle against the
art works of Aeschylus and Sophocles—not with critical writings, but as a
dramatic poet, who sets up his idea of tragedy in opposition
to the tradition.
12
Before we designate this other spectator by name, let’s linger
here a moment to call to mind for ourselves that impression of the duality and
incommensurability at the heart of Aeschylean tragedy, something we
described earlier. Let us think about our own surprise at and unease with
the chorus and the tragic hero of those
tragedies, both of which we did not know how to reconcile with what
we are used to any more than with the tradition—until we again recognized that
duality itself as the origin and essence of Greek tragedy, as the expression of
two artistic drives woven together, the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
To cut that primordial and all-powerful Dionysian element out of
tragedy and to rebuild tragedy as a pure, new, and un-Dionysian art, morality,
and world view—that has now revealed itself to us very clearly as the tendency
of Euripides.
Near the end of his life, Euripides himself proposed as
emphatically as possible for his contemporaries the question about
the value and meaning of this tendency in a myth. Should the Dionysian exist at
all? Should we not eradicate it forcefully from Greek soil? Of course we
should, the poet says to us, if only it were possible,
but the god Dionysus is too powerful. The most sensible opponent—like Pentheus in
the Bacchae—is unexpectedly charmed by Dionysus and later runs in this
enchanted state to his own destruction. The judgment of the two old men, Cadmus
and Teiresias, seems also to be the judgment of the aged poet: the
thinking of the cleverest individual does not throw away that old folk
tradition, that eternally propagating reverence for Dionysus; indeed, where
such amazing powers are concerned, it is appropriate at least to demonstrate a
diplomatically prudent show of joining in. But even with that, it is still
possible that the god might take offence at such lukewarm participation
and in the end transform the diplomat into a dragon—as happens
here with Cadmus.59 The
poet tells us this, a poet who fought throughout his long life against Dionysus
with heroic force—only to conclude his life with a glorification of his
opponent and a suicide, like a man suffering from vertigo who, in
order to escape the dreadful dizziness, which he can no longer endure, throws
himself off a tower. That tragedy [Bacchae] is a protest
against the practicality of his artistic program [Tendenz],
alas, and it had already succeeded! A miracle had taken place: just when the
poet recanted, his program had already triumphed. Dionysus had already been
chased off the tragic stage, and by a daemonic power speaking out from
Euripides. But Euripides was, in a certain sense, only a mask: the divinity
which spoke out of him was not Dionysus, and not Apollo, but an entirely
new-born daemon called Socrates. This is the new opposition: the Dionysian
and the Socratic. And from this contrast, Greek tragedy perished as a work of
art. No matter how much Euripides might now seek to console us with his
retraction, he was unsuccessful: the most magnificent temple lay in ruins. What
use to us are the laments of the destroyer and his awareness that it had been
the most beautiful of all temples? And even if Euripides himself, as a
punishment, has been turned into a dragon by the artistic critics of all
ages—who can be satisfied with this paltry compensation?
Let us get closer now to this Socratic trend,
with which Euripides fought against and conquered Aeschylean tragedy.
What purpose—that’s the question we need to ask ourselves at this
point—could Euripides’ intention to ground drama solely on the un-Dionysian
have generally had, if we assume its implementation had the very
highest ideals? What form of drama still remained, if it was not to be born
from the womb of music, in that mysterious half-light of the Dionysian? All it
could be was dramatic epic, an
Apollonian art form, in which the tragic effect is naturally
unattainable. This is not a matter of the content of the represented events.
Indeed, I could assert that in Goethe’s proposed Nausikaa it
would have been impossible to make the suicide of that idyllic being—which was
to be carried out in the fifth act—grippingly tragic, for the power of the
Apollonian epic is so extraordinary that right before our very eyes it
magically transforms the most horrific things through that joy in and redemption
through appearances. The poet of the dramatic epic cannot completely fuse with
his pictures, any more than the epic rhapsodist can: it is still a matter of
calm, tranquil contemplation, looking with open eyes, a state which sees the images
in front of it. The actor in this dramatized epic still remains,
in the most profound sense, a rhapsodist; the consecration of the inner dream lies
upon all his actions, so that he is never completely an actor.
Now, how is Euripides’ work related to this ideal of Apollonian
drama? It is just like the relationship of the solemn rhapsodist of the olden
times to that younger attitude, whose nature is described in Plato’s Ion as
follows: “When I say something sad, my eyes fill with tears. But if what I say
is horrifying and terrible, then the hairs on my head stand on end from fright,
and my heart beats loudly.” Here we no longer see the epic dissolution of
being in appearances, the disinterested coolness of the real actor, who
remains, particularly in his most intense activity, totally appearance and
delight in appearances. Euripides is the actor with the beating heart, with his
hair standing on end. He designs his work as a Socratic thinker, and he carries
it out as a passionate actor. Euripides is a pure artist neither in planning
his work nor in carrying it out. Thus, the Euripidean drama is
simultaneously a cool and fiery thing, equally capable of freezing or burning.
It is impossible for it to attain the Apollonian effect of the epic, while, on
the other hand, it has divorced itself as much as possible from the Dionysian
elements, and now, in order to work at all, it needs new ways to arouse people,
methods which can no longer lie within either of the two individual artistic
drives of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. These methods of arousing people
are detached paradoxical ideas—substituted for Apollonian objects
of contemplation—and fiery emotions—substituted for Dionysian
enchantment. The fiery effects are, to be sure, imitated with the highest
degree of realism, but the ideas and emotional effects are not in the slightest
imbued with the spirit of art.
Hence, if we have recognized this much, that Euripides was not at
all successful in basing his drama solely on Apollonian principles, that, by contrast,
his un-Dionysian tendencies led him astray into an inartistic naturalism, we
will now able to move closer to the essential quality of Socratic aesthetics,
whose most important law runs something like this: “Everything must
be understandable in order to be beautiful,” a corollary to the Socratic
saying, “Only the knowledgeable person is virtuous.” With this canon in hand,
Euripides assessed all the individual features and justified them according to
this principle: the language, the characters, the dramatic construction, the
choral music. What we habitually assess so frequently in Euripides as a
poetical deficiency and a backward step, in comparison with Sophoclean tragedy,
is for the most part the product of that emphatic critical process, that daring
intelligence. Let the Euripidean prologue serve for us as
an example of what that rationalistic method produces. Nothing can be more
offensive to our stage techniques than the prologue in a Euripidean play.
That a single person should step forward at the beginning of a work and explain
who he is, what has gone on before the action starts, what has happened up to
this point, and, indeed, what will occur in the unfolding of the work, that
would strike a modern poetical dramatist as a wanton, inexcusable abandonment
of the effect of suspense. If we, in fact, know everything which is going to
happen, who will want to sit around waiting to see that it really does happen?
For here there is nothing like the stimulating relationship between a prophetic
dream and a real event which occurs later. Euripides thought quite differently
about the matter. The effect of tragedy, he believed, never depended on epic
suspense, on the tempting uncertainty about what would happen now and later. It
depended far more on those great rhetorical-lyrical scenes in which the passion
and dialectic of the main hero swelled up into a wide and powerful torrent.
Everything was preparing for pathos, not for action, and what did not prepare
the way for pathos was considered disposable. But the most serious barrier to
the delighted devotion to such scenes is any part the spectator found missing,
a gap in the network of the previous events. As long as the listener still has
to figure out what this or that person means, what gives rise to this or that
conflict in motives or purposes, then his full immersion in the suffering and
action of the main characters, his breathless sympathy with and fear for them,
is not yet possible. The Aeschylean-Sophoclean tragedies made use of
the most elegant artistic methods to provide the spectators in the opening
scenes, as if by chance, all those necessary clues to understanding everything,
a technique in which their noble artistry proves its worth by allowing
the necessary features to appear, so to speak, as something
masked and accidental. But for all that, Euripides believed he noticed that
during those first scenes the spectator was oddly disturbed having to figure out the simple arithmetic of the previous
events, so that the poetical beauties and the pathos of the exposition were
lost on him. Therefore Euripides set up the prologue even before the exposition
and put it in the mouth of a person whom people could trust—often a divinity
had to more or less guarantee the outcome of the tragedy for the public and
take away all doubts about the reality of the myth, in a manner similar to the
way in which Descartes was able to establish the reality of the empirical world
only through an appeal to the truthfulness of God and his inability to lie. At
the end of his drama, Euripides once again made use of this same divine
truthfulness in order to confirm his hero’s future for the
public. This is the function of the notorious deus ex machina.60 Between the epic
preview and final preview lay the lyrical, dramatic present, the essential
“drama.”
So Euripides as a poet is, above all, the echo of his conscious
knowledge, and it is precisely this which confers upon him such a memorable
place in the history of Greek art.
In view of his critically productive creativity it must have often
struck him that he had to bring alive in drama the opening of Anaxagoras’ text,
the first lines of which go as follows: “In the beginning everything was
confused, but then came reason and created order.” And if, among philosophers,
Anaxagoras, with his concept of nous [mind], seems like
the first sober man among nothing but drunkards, so Euripides might have conceptualized his relationship to the other tragic poets with a
similar image.61 So
long as the single creator of order and ruler of all, nous [mind], was still excluded from artistic creativity, everything
was still mixed up in a chaotic primordial stew. That’s how Euripides must have
judged the matter; that’s how he, as the first “sober” poet, must have passed
sentence on the “drunken” poets. What Sophocles said about Aeschylus—that he
does what’s right, without being aware of it—was certainly not said in any Euripidean sense.
Euripides would have conceded only that Aeschylus created improperly because he
created without any conscious awareness. Even the god-like Plato speaks of how
the creative capability of poets is not a conscious insight, but for the most
part only ironically, and he draws a comparison with the talent of prophets and
dream interpreters, since the poet is not able to write until he has lost his
conscious mind and reason no longer resides in him. Euripides undertook the
task, as Plato did, too, of showing the world the opposite of the “irrational”
poet. His basic aesthetic principle, “Everything must be conscious in order to
be beautiful,” is, as I have mentioned, the corollary of the Socratic saying,
“Everything must be conscious in order to be good.” With this in mind, we are
entitled to assess Euripides as the poet of aesthetic Socratism. Socrates,
however, was that second spectator, who did not understand the
older tragedy and therefore did not value it. With Socrates as his ally,
Euripides dared to be the herald of a new artistic creativity. If the older
tragedy perished from this development, then aesthetic Socratism is
the murdering principle. But insofar as the fight was directed against the
Dionysian of the older art, we recognize in Socrates the enemy of Dionysus, the
new Orpheus, who roused himself against Dionysus, and who, although destined to
be torn apart by the maenads of the Athenian Court of Justice,
nevertheless compelled the overpowering god himself to run away.62 Dionysus,
as before, when he fled from Lycurgus, king of the Edoni,
saved himself in the depths of the sea, that is, in the mysterious floods of a
secret cult which would gradually overrun the entire world.
13
That Socrates had a close relationship to Euripides’ attitude did
not escape their contemporaries in ancient times, and the clearest illustration
of this happy intuition is that rumour running around Athens that
Socrates was in the habit of helping Euripides with his poetry. Both names were
linked by the supporters of the “good old days” when it was time to list the
present popular leaders whose influence had brought about a situation in which
the old sturdy fitness in mind and body manifested at the Battle of Marathon
was being increasingly sacrificed for a dubious way of explaining
things, in a continuing erosion of the physical and mental powers.63 This
was the tone, half indignation, half contempt, in which Aristophanic comedy
habitually talked of those men, to the horror of the newer generations, who,
although happy enough to betray Euripides, could not contain their surprise
that Socrates appeared in Aristophanes as the first and most important sophist,
as the mirror and essence of all sophistic ambitions. Their only consolation
for this was to pillory Aristophanes himself as an impudent
lying Alcibiades of poetry.64 Without here
defending the profound instincts of Aristophanes against such attacks, I will
proceed to demonstrate the close interrelationship between Socrates and
Euripides as the ancients saw it. It’s important to remember, in this connection,
that Socrates, as an opponent of tragic art,
did not attended the performances of tragedy and only joined the spectators
when a new piece by Euripides was being produced. The best known link, however,
is the close juxtaposition of both names in the pronouncements of the Delphic
Oracle, which indicated that Socrates was the wisest of men and at the same
time delivered the judgment that Euripides captured second prize in the contest
for wisdom.
Sophocles was the third person named in this hierarchy, the man
who could praise himself in comparison with Aeschylus by saying that he
(Sophocles) did what was right because he knew what was right.
Obviously the particular degree of clarity in these men’s knowledge was
the factor that designated them collectively as the three “wise men” of their
time.
But the most pointed statement about that new and unheard of high
opinion of knowledge and understanding was uttered by Socrates, when he claimed
that he was the only person to assert that he knew nothing; whereas,
in his critical wandering about in Athens conversing with the greatest
statesmen, orators, poets, and artists, everywhere he ran into people who
imagined they knew things. Astonished, he recognized that all these famous
people themselves had no correct and clear insight into their careers and
carried out their work only instinctually. “Only from instinct”—with this expression
we touch upon the heart and centre of the Socratic attitude. Given this, Socratism condemns
prevailing art as well as prevailing ethics. Wherever he directs his searching
gaze, he sees a lack of insight and the power of delusion, and from this lack
he infers the inner falsity and worthlessness of present conditions. On the
basis of this one point, Socrates believed he had to correct existence. He, a
solitary individual, stepped forward with an expression of contempt and
superiority, as the pioneer of an entirely different style of culture, art, and
morality, into a world, a scrap of which we would count an honour and
the greatest good fortune to catch.
That is the immensely disturbing thing which always grips us about
Socrates and which over and over again stimulates us to find out the meaning
and intention of this man, the most problematic figure of ancient times. Who is
the man who can dare, as an individual, to deny the essence of Greece, which as
Homer, Pindar, and Aeschylus, as Phidias, as Pericles, as Pythia, and Dionysus, as the most profound abyss and
loftiest height, can count on our astonished veneration? What daemonic force is
it that could dare to sprinkle this magic drink in the dust? What demigod is it
to whom the ghostly chorus of the noblest specimens of humanity had
to cry out: “Alas, alas! You have destroyed the beautiful world
with your mighty fist. It is collapsing, falling to pieces!”65
A key to the essence of Socrates is offered to us by that amazing
phenomenon indicated by the term “Socrates’ daimonon.”
Under special circumstances, in which his immense reasoning power was gripped
by doubt, he got a firm clue from a divine voice which expressed itself at such
times. When this voice came, it always sounded a cautionary note.
In this totally anomalous character, instinctive wisdom reveals itself only in
order to stand up now and then against conscious knowledge as a
hindrance. Whereas in all productive men instinct is the truly creative and
affirming power, and consciousness acts as a critical and cautioning reaction,
in Socrates instinct becomes the critic, consciousness becomes the
creator—truly a monstrosity per defectum [from
some defect]! Indeed, we do perceive here a grotesque defectus [defect] of every mystical
talent, so that Socrates can be considered a specific case of the non-mystical
man, in whom the logical character has become simply too massive through
excessive use, just like instinctive wisdom in the mystic. On the other hand,
however, it was utterly impossible for that logical drive, as it
appeared in Socrates, to turn against itself. In its unfettered outpouring it
demonstrates a natural force of the sort we meet, to our shuddering surprise,
only in the very greatest of all instinctive powers. Anyone who has sensed in
the Platonic texts the merest scent of that god-like naïveté and
confidence in the direction of Socrates’ life has also felt how that immense
drive wheel of logical Socratism is in motion, as it were, behind Socrates
and how we are compelled to see this through Socrates, as if we were looking
through a shadow. That he himself had a premonition of this relationship comes
out in the dignified seriousness with which he assessed his divine calling
everywhere, even before his judges. To censure him for this was basically as
impossible as to approve of his influence on the dissolution of instinct. When
Socrates was hauled before the assembly of the Greek state, there was only one
single form of sentence for this irreconcilable conflict, namely,
banishment: people should have expelled him beyond the borders as something
completely enigmatic, unclassifiable, inexplicable, so that some posterity
could not justly indict the Athenians for acting shamefully. But the fact that
death and not mere exile was pronounced over him Socrates himself
appears to have brought about, fully clear about what he was doing and without
the natural horror of death: he went to his death with that tranquillity Plato
describes him showing as he leaves the Symposium, the last drinker in the early
light of dawn, to start a new day, while behind him, on the benches and on the
ground, his sleeping dinner companions remain, to dream of Socrates, the truly
erotic man. The dying Socrates became the new ideal of the
noble Greek youth, one never seen before. Above all, the typical Greek youth,
Plato, prostrated himself before Socrates’ image with all the fervent adoration
of his passionately enthusiastic soul.
14
Let’s now imagine that one great Cyclops eye of Socrates focussed on tragedy, that eye in which the beautiful
madness of artistic enthusiasm never glowed—let’s imagine how it was impossible
for that eye to peer into the Dionysian abyss with a feeling of
pleasure.66 What
must that eye have actually seen in the “lofty and highly praised” tragic art,
as Plato calls it? Something really unreasonable—causes without effects and
effects which seemed to have no causes, and the whole so confused and with so
many different elements that any reasonable disposition had to reject it, but
dangerous tinder for sensitive and susceptible souls. We know which
single form of poetry Socrates understood: Aesop’s
Fables, and he certainly did so with that
smiling complacency with which the noble and good Gellert in
his fable of the bee and the hen sings the praises of poetry:
You see
in me the use of poetry—
To tell the man without much sense
A picture image of the truth of things.67
But for Socrates tragic art did not seem “to speak the truth” at
all, quite apart from the fact that it addressed itself to the man who “does
not possess much sense,” and thus not to philosophers, a double excuse to keep
one’s distance from it. Like Plato, he assigned it to the arts of cosmetics,
which present only what is pleasant, not what is useful, and he therefore made
the demand that his disciples abstain and strictly stay away from such unphilosophical temptations, with so much success that the
youthful poet of tragedy, Plato, immediately burned his poetical writing, so
that he could become Socrates’ student. But where invincible talents fought
against the Socratic instructions, his power, together with the force of that immense personality, was still great enough to force poetry
itself into new attitudes, unknown up until then.
An example of this is Plato himself. To be sure, in his
condemnation of tragedy and art in general he did not remain back behind the
naive cynicism of his master. But completely from artistic necessity he had to
create an art form inwardly related to the existing art forms which
he had rejected. The major criticism which Plato had made about the older
art—that it was the imitation of an illusion and thus belonged to an even lower
level than the empirical world—must above all not be directed against the new
work of art. And so we see Plato exerting himself to go beyond reality
and to present the Idea which forms the basis of that pseudo-reality.68 With
that, however, Plato the thinker reached by a detour the very place where, as a
poet, he had always been at home and from where Sophocles and all the older art
was solemnly protesting against Plato’s criticism. If tragedy had assimilated
into itself all earlier forms of art, so the same again holds true, in an odd
way, for the Platonic dialogue, which was created from a mixture of all
available styles and forms and hovers between explanation, lyric, drama,
between prose and poetry, right in the middle, and in so doing broke through
the strict old law about the unity of stylistic form. The Cynic writers
went even further along the same path. In the excessive garishness of their
style, in their weaving back and forth between prose and metrical forms, they
produced the literary image of “raving Socrates,” which they
were in the habit of depicting in their own lives.69 The
Platonic dialogue was, so to speak, the boat on which the shipwreck of the
older poetry, along with all its children, was saved. Pushed together into a
single narrow space and with Socrates at the helm they anxiously and humbly set
off now into a new world, which never could get its fill of looking at
fantastic images of this procession. Plato truly gave all future generations
the image of a new form of art, the image of the novel, which can
be characterized as an infinitely intensified Aesopian fable, in
which poetry lived on with a relative priority to dialectical philosophy
similar to the relative priority of that very philosophy to theology for many
centuries, that is, as ancilla [subservient
maid]. This was poetry’s new position, the place into which Plato forced it
under the pressure of the daemonic Socrates.
Now philosophical ideas grew up around art and
forced it to cling closely to the trunk of dialectic. The Apollonian attitude
metamorphosed into logical systematizing, just as we noticed something similar
with Euripides and, in addition, the Dionysian was transformed
into naturalistic emotions. Socrates, the dialectical hero in Platonic drama,
reminds us of the changed nature of the Euripidean hero, who has to
defend his actions with reasons and counter-reasons and thus often runs the
risk of losing our tragic sympathy. For who can fail to recognize the optimistic
element in the heart of dialectic, which celebrates a jubilee with
every conclusion and can breathe only in cool brightness and consciousness,
that optimistic element which, once it has penetrated tragedy, must gradually
overrun its Dionysian regions and necessarily drive them to
self-destruction—right to their death leap into middle-class drama. Let people
merely recall the consequences of the Socratic sayings “Virtue is knowledge;
sin arises only from ignorance; the virtuous person is the happy person”: in
these three basic forms of optimism lies the death of tragedy. For now the
virtuous hero must be a dialectician; now there must be a necessarily
perceptible link between virtue and knowledge, belief and morality; now the
transcendental resolution of justice in Aeschylus is lowered to the flat and impertinent
principle of “poetic justice” with its customary deus ex machina.
What does this new Socratic optimistic stage world think about the
chorus and the whole musical-Dionysian foundation for tragedy in general? As
something accidental, as a reminder of the origin of tragedy, which we can well
do without. We, by contrast, have come to realize that the chorus can only be
understood as the cause of tragedy and of the tragic in
general. Already with Sophocles the issue of the chorus reveals something of an
embarrassment—an important indication that even with him the Dionysian stage of
tragedy is beginning to fall apart. He no longer dares to trust the chorus to
carry the major share of the action, but limits its role to such an extent that
it now appears almost coordinated with the actors, just as if it had been lifted
up out of the orchestra into the scene. This feature naturally destroys its
nature completely, no matter how much Aristotle may have approved of this
particular arrangement of the chorus. That displacement of the chorus, which
Sophocles certainly recommended through his dramatic practice and, according to
tradition, even in a written text, is the first step toward the destruction of
the chorus, whose phases in Euripides, Agathon,
and the New Comedy followed one after the other with breakneck speed. Optimistic
dialectic, with its syllogistic whip, drove music
out of tragedy; that is, it destroyed the essence of tragedy, which can be
interpreted only as a manifestation and representation of Dionysian states, as
a perceptible symbolizing of music, as the dream world of a Dionysian intoxication.
If we have thus noticed an anti-Dionysian tendency already
effective even before Socrates, which only in him achieves incredible,
brilliant expression, then we must not shrink from the question of where such a
phenomenon as Socrates points to. For we are not in a
position, given the Platonic dialogues, to see that phenomenon merely as a
negative force of dissolution. And so, while it’s true that the
most immediate effect of the Socratic drive was to bring about the subversion
of Dionysian tragedy, a profound living experience of Socrates himself forces
us to the question whether there must necessarily be only an antithetical
relationship between Socratism and art and whether the birth of an
“artistic Socrates” is in general an inherent contradiction.
For where art is concerned, that despotic logician now
and then had the feeling of a gap, of an emptiness,
of a partial reproach, of a duty he had perhaps neglected. As he explains to
his friends in prison, one and the same dream apparition often came to him,
always with the same words, “Socrates, practice music!” He calmed himself,
right up to his last days, with the interpretation that his practice of
philosophy was the highest musical art and believed that it was incorrect that
a divinity would remind him of “common, popular music.” Finally in prison, in
order to relieve his conscience completely, he agreed to practice that music,
something he had considered insignificant. And in this mood, he composed a poem
to Apollo and rendered a few of Aesop’s fables in verse. What drove him to this
practice was something like the voice of his warning daemon: it was his
Apollonian insight that, like a barbarian king, he did not understand a noble
divine image and was in danger of sinning against a divinity—through his
failure to understand. That statement of Socrates’ dream vision is
the single indication of his thinking about something perhaps beyond the
borders of his logical nature. So he had to ask himself: Is something which I
do not understand not also something incomprehensible? Perhaps
there is a kingdom of wisdom which is forbidden to the logician? Perhaps art is
even a necessary correlative and supplement to scientific understanding?
15
In the sense of this last mysterious question we must now state
how the influence of Socrates has spread out over later worlds, right up to
this moment and, indeed, into all future ages, like a shadow in the evening sun
constantly growing larger, how that influence always makes necessary the
re-creation of art—I mean art in its most profound and widest
metaphysical sense—and through its own immortality guarantees the immortality of
art.
Before we could recognize this fact, before we convincingly
established the innermost dependence of every art on the Greeks, from
Homer right up to Socrates, we had to treat these Greeks as the Athenians
treated Socrates. Almost every era and cultural stage has at some point sought
in a profoundly ill-tempered frame of mind to free itself of the
Greeks, because in comparison with the Greeks, all their own achievements,
apparently fully original and admired in all sincerity, suddenly appeared to
lose their colour and life and shrivelled to
unsuccessful copies, in fact, to caricatures. And so a heartfelt inner anger
always keeps breaking out again against that arrogant little nation which dared to
designate for all time everything that was not produced in its own country as
“barbaric.” Who were those Greeks, people asked themselves, who, although they
had achieved only an ephemeral historical glitter, only ridiculously restricted
institutions, only an ambiguous competence in morality, who could even be
identified with hateful vices, yet who had nevertheless laid a claim to a
dignity and a pre-eminent place among peoples, appropriate to a genius among
the masses? Unfortunately people were not lucky enough to find the cup of
hemlock which could easily do away with such a being, for all the poisons which
envy, slander, and inner rage created were insufficient to destroy that
self-satisfied magnificence. Hence, confronted by the Greeks, people have been
ashamed and afraid, unless an individual values the truth above everything else
and dares to propose this truth: the notion that the Greeks, as the charioteers
of our culture and every other one, hold the reins, but that almost always the
wagon and horses are inferior material and do not match the glory of their
drivers, who then consider it amusing to whip such a team into the abyss, over
which they themselves jump with the leap of Achilles.
To demonstrate that Socrates also merits a place among the drivers
of the chariot, it is sufficient to recognize him as typifying a form of
existence inconceivable before him, the type known as The Theoretical
Man. Our next task is to reach some insight about the meaning and purpose
of such a man. The theoretical man, like the artist, also takes an infinite
satisfaction in the present and is, like the artist, protected by that
satisfaction from the practical ethic of pessimism and from its lynx eyes which
glow only in the darkness. For while the artist, with each revelation of the
truth, always keeps his enchanted gaze hanging on what still remains hidden
after his revelation, theoretical man enjoys and remains satisfied with the
covers which have been cast aside and takes as the greatest object of delight
the process of continually happy unveiling which his own power has brought
about. There would be no science if it concerned itself only with that one naked
goddess and with nothing else. For then its disciples would have to feel like
people who wanted to dig a hole straight through the earth, and each of them
sees that, even with the greatest lifelong effort, he is in a position to dig
through only a really small piece of the immense depths, and that piece will be
covered over in front of his eyes by the work of the person who comes after
him, so that a third person would apparently do well to select on his own
initiative a new place for his tunneling efforts. Well, if someone now
convincingly demonstrates that it is impossible to reach the antipodes by this
direct route, who will still want to continue working on in the old depths,
unless in the meantime he lets himself be satisfied with the possibility of
finding some valuable rock or discovering some natural law? For that reason,
Lessing, the most honest theoretical man, ventured to state that for him the
search for the truth counted for more than truth itself. With that statement
the fundamental secret of science is unmasked, to the astonishment, indeed, the
anger, of scientists. Now, of course, alongside occasional recognitions like
Lessing’s, prompted by excessive honesty if not high spirits, stands a profound delusion,
which first came into the world in the person of Socrates, the unshakeable
faith that thinking, guided by the main idea of causality, might reach into the
deepest abyss of being and that thinking is capable, not just of understanding
being, but even of correcting it. This sublime metaphysical
delusion is instinctually part of science and leads it over and over again to
its limits, at which point it must turn into art, something which is
really predictable with this mechanical process.
With the torch of this idea, let’s now look at Socrates: to us he
appears as the first person who was capable not only of living by that instinct
for science, but also—something much more—of dying by it, and thus the picture
of the dying Socrates as a man raised above fear of death by
knowledge and reason is the shield hanging over the entranceway to science,
reminding every individual of his purpose, namely, to make existence
intelligible and thus apparently justified. Of course, when reasoning cannot
succeed in this endeavour, myth must also finally serve, something which I have just noted as the necessary
consequence, indeed, even the purpose, of science.
Once anyone clearly sees how, after Socrates, that mystagogue of science, one philosophical school
succeeds another in sequence, like wave after wave, how a never-imagined
universal greed for knowledge throughout the widest extent of the educated
world steered science around on the high seas as the essential task for every
person of greater capabilities, a greed which it has been impossible since then
completely to expel from science, how through this universality a common net of
thinking was cast over the entire earth for the first time, with prospects, in
fact, of the rule-bound workings of an entire solar system—whoever reminds
himself of all this, together with that astonishingly high pyramid of
contemporary knowledge, cannot deny the fact that in Socrates we see a turning
point and vortex of so-called world history. Then imagine for a moment if the
entire incalculable sum of the energy which has been used in pursuit of that
world project were spent, not in the service of knowledge, but
on the practical, that is, the egotistical, aims of individuals and peoples,
then in all probability the instinctive delight in living would be so weakened
by universal wars of destruction and continuing migrations of
people that, with suicide being a common occurrence, perhaps the
individual would have had to feel the final remnant of a sense of duty, when
he, like the inhabitants of the Fiji Islands, as a son would strangle his
parents, and as a friend would strangle his friend—a practical pessimism, which
could even give rise to a dreadful ethic of mass murder out of sympathy—an ethic
which, by the way, is present and has been present all over the world, wherever
art has not appeared in some form or other, especially in religion and science,
as a remedy and a defence against that miasma.
With respect to this practical pessimism, Socrates is the original
picture of the theoretical optimist, who, as I have described, in the belief
that we could come to understand the nature of things, thinks that the power of
a universal medicine is contained in knowledge and discovery and that evil inherently
consists of error. To push forward with that reasoning and to separate true
knowledge from appearance and from error seemed to the Socratic man the
noblest, even the single truly human, vocation, and so from Socrates on, that
mechanism of ideas, judgments, and conclusions has been valued as the highest
activity and the most admirable gift of nature, above all other capabilities.
Even the noblest moral deeds, the emotions of pity, of self-sacrifice, of
heroism and that calmness in the soul, so difficult to attain, which the
Apollonian Greeks called sophrosyne—all
these were derived by Socrates and his like-minded descendants right up to the
present time from the dialectic of knowledge and therefore described as
teachable. Whoever has experienced for himself the
delight of a Socratic discovery and feels how this, in ever-widening circles,
seeks to enclose the entire world of phenomena, will from then on find no spur
capable of pushing him into existence more intense than the desire to complete
that conquest and to weave a solid impenetrable net. To a man so
minded, the Platonic Socrates then appears as the teacher of an entirely new
form of “Greek serenity” and of a blissful existence, which seeks to discharge
itself in actions and which will find this discharge, for the most part, in
those influences which come from acting as a midwife to and educating noble
disciples, in order finally to produce a genius.
But now science, incited by its powerful delusion, speeds on
inexorably right to its limits, at which point the optimism hidden in the
essence of logic breaks down. For the circumference of the circle of science
has an infinity of points, and while it is still impossible to see how that
circumference could ever be completely measured, nevertheless the noble,
talented man, before the middle of his life, inevitably comes up against such a
border point on that circumference, where he stares out into something which
cannot be illuminated. When, at this point, he sees to his horror how at these
limits logic turns around on itself and finally bites its own
tail—then a new form of knowledge breaks through, tragic insight,
which, in order merely to be endured, requires art as a protector and healer.
If we look at the loftiest realms of that world streaming around
us, our eyes strengthened and refreshed by the Greeks, we become aware of that
greed of insatiably optimistic knowledge, exemplary in Socrates, turning into
tragic resignation and a need for art, even if it’s true that this same greed,
at its lower levels, must express itself as hostile to art and must inwardly
loathe Dionysian tragic art in particular, as I have already explained in the example
of the conflict between Aeschylean tragedy and Socratism.
Here we are now knocking, with turbulent feelings, on the doors of
the present and future: Will that “turning around” lead to
continuously new configurations of genius and straight to the music-playing
Socrates? Will that net of art spread out over existence, whether in the
name of religion or of science, be woven always more tightly and delicately, or
is it determined that it will be ripped to shreds by the restless barbaric
impulses and hurly-burly which we now call “the present”?—We are standing here on
the sidelines for a little while as lookers on, worried but not without hope,
for we are being permitted to witness that immense struggle and transition.
Alas! The magic of these battles is that whoever looks at them must also fight
them!
16
By setting out this historical example, we have attempted to
clarify how tragedy just as surely dies away with the disappearance of the
spirit of music, as it can be born only out of this spirit. To mitigate the
strangeness of this claim and, on the other hand, to indicate the origin of
this insight of ours, we must now openly face up to analogous phenomena of the
present time. We must stride right into the midst of those battles which, as I
have just said, are being waged in the loftiest spheres of our present world
between the insatiably optimistic desire to know and the tragic need for art.
In this discussion, I shall omit all the other opposing drives which have in
every age worked against art, especially against tragedy, and which at present
have also taken hold with such confidence of victory that, for example, in the
art of the theatre, only farces and ballets produce fragrant
blossoms with a reasonably luxurious bloom, which is perhaps not for everyone.
I shall speak only of the most illustrious opposition to
the tragic world view: by that I mean scientific knowledge, optimistic to the
deepest core of its being, with its father Socrates at the very
pinnacle. Shortly I shall also indicate by name the forces which seem to me to
guarantee a rebirth of tragedy— and who knows what other blessed
hopes for the German character!
Before we leap into the middle of that battle, let us wrap
ourselves in the armour of the insights we seized
upon earlier. In opposition to all those eager to derive art from a single
principle as the necessary living origin of every work of art, I keep my eyes
fixed on both those artistic divinities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, and
recognize in them the living and clear representatives of two art
worlds, different in their deepest being and their highest goals. Apollo stands
before me as the transfigured genius of the principium
individuationis, through which release is only to
be truly attained through illusion; whereas, under the mystical joyous cries of
Dionysus, the spell of individuation is shattered, and the way lies open to the
maternal source of being, to the innermost core of things. This tremendous difference,
which opens up a yawning gap between plastic art as the Apollonian and music as
the Dionysian art, became obvious to only one of the great thinkers, to the
extent that he, even without that prompting from the symbolism of the Greek
gods, recognized for music a character and origin different from all the other
arts, because music is not, like all those others, the image of appearance, but
an immediate portrayal of the will itself and also because it presents the
metaphysical as compared to all physical things in the world, the
thing-in-itself in comparison with all appearances (Schopenhauer, World
as Will and Idea, I.1.3.52). On this most significant insight into all
aesthetics, which, taken seriously, marks the first beginning of aesthetics,
Richard Wagner, as confirmation of its lasting truth, set his stamp, when he
established in Beethoven that music must be assessed on
aesthetic principles entirely different from those for all fine arts and not at
all according to the category of beauty, although an erroneous aesthetics in
the service of a misleading and degenerate art, had, because of that idea
of beauty asserting itself in the world of images, become accustomed to demand
from music an effect similar to what it demanded from works of the plastic
arts, namely, the arousal of satisfaction in beautiful forms. After
the discovery of that tremendous opposition, I sensed a strong urge to bring
myself closer to the essence of Greek tragedy and, in so doing, to the most
profound revelation of the Hellenic genius. Only now did I believe I was
capable of the magical task of posing the basic problem of tragedy vividly in
my own mind, over and above the jargon of our customary aesthetics. Through
that, I was granted such a strange, idiosyncratic glimpse into the Hellenic
that it had to appear to me as if our classical-Hellenic scholarship,
which behaves so proudly, had up to this point known, for the most part, only
how to gloat over games with shadows and trivialities.
Perhaps we can touch on that original problem with the following question:
What aesthetic effect arises when those inherently separate powers of art, the
Apollonian and the Dionysian, come to operate alongside each other? Or, put
more briefly, what is the relationship of music to images and ideas? Schopenhauer,
whom Richard Wagner applauded on this very point for the unsurpassable clarity
and perceptiveness of his explanation, spoke his views on this matter in the
greatest detail in the following place, which I will quote again here in full,
from World as Will and Idea, I, p. 309:
“As a result of all this, we can look upon the world of
appearance, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same
thing, which itself is thus the only mediating factor in the analogy between
the two of them; thus, an insight into this mediating factor is required in
order to understand that analogy. According to this, music, when considered as
an expression of the world, is to the highest degree a universal language,
something which even has a relationship with the universality of ideas, rather
like the way these are related to particular things. Its universality, however,
is in no way that empty universality of abstractions, but something of an
entirely different kind, bound up with a thoroughly clear certainty. In this,
music is like geometric figures and numbers, which are the universal forms of
all possible objects of experience and applicable to them all a priori,
not, however, in an abstract manner but vividly and thoroughly fixed. All
possible efforts, excitements, and manifestations of the will, all those
processes inside human beings, which reason subsumes under the broad negative
concept of feelings, can be expressed through the infinite number of possible
melodies, but always in the universality of mere form, without matter, always
only according to the thing-in-itself, not according to its appearance; they
are, so to speak, its innermost soul, without the body. From this intimate
relationship which music has with the true essence of all things, we can also
account for the fact that when an appropriate music is heard in any scene,
business, action, or environment, this music appears to open up to us the most
secret sense of these things and comes forward as the most correct and clearest
commentary on them, in the same way that for the man who surrenders himself
entirely to the experience of a symphony it is as if he saw all possible events
of life and of the world drawn over into himself, and yet he cannot, if he
thinks about it, perceive any similarity between that play of sounds and the
things which are in his mind. For music is, as mentioned, different from all
other arts in this sense: it is not a portrayal of appearances, or more
correctly, the adequate objectification of the will, but the immediate portrayal
of the will itself, as well as the metaphysical complement of all physical
things in the world and the thing-in-itself of all appearances. We could, therefore,
call the world the embodiment of music just as much as the embodiment of the
will. And that is why it is understandable that music is capable of bringing
out every painting, indeed, every scene of real life and the world with an
immediate and higher significance and, of course, to do that all the more, the
closer the analogy of its melody is to the inner spirit of the given
phenomenon. On this point we base the fact that we can set a poem to music as a
song, or a vivid presentation as a pantomime, or both as an opera. Such
individual pictures of human life, given a foundation in the universal language
of music, are never bound to music and do not correspond with music by some
constant necessity, but stand in relation to music as a random example to a
universal idea. They present in the clarity of the real the very thing which
music expresses in the universality of mere form. For melodies are, to a
certain extent, like general ideas, an abstractum [abstraction] from
the reality. For reality, that is, the world of individual things, supplies
clear phenomena, remarkable and individual things, the single case, to both the
universality of ideas and to the universality of melodies. Both of these
universals, however, are, from a certain point of view, contrary to each other,
since ideas consist only of forms abstracted first of all from perception, the
stripped-away outer skin of things, so to speak, and are thus really and entirely abstracta [abstractions]; music, by
contrast, gives the heart of the thing, the innermost core, which comes before
all particular forms. This relationship can be really well expressed in the language
of the scholastics, when we say: ideas are the universalia post rem [universals after the fact]; music, however, gives the universalia ante rem [universals before the fact], and reality the universalia in
re [universals in the fact]. That in general there can be a
connection between a musical composition and a perceptible presentation,
however, rests on the point that, as stated, both are only very different expressions
of same inner essence of the world. Now, when in a particular case such a
connection is truly present, that is, the composer has known how to express in
the universal language of music the dynamic of the will, which constitutes the
core of an event, then the melody of the song, the music of the opera, is full
of expression. But the analogy discovered by the composer between those two
must issue from his immediate insight into the world’s essence, unknown to his
reason, and must not be an imitation, conveyed in ideas with conscious intentionality.
Otherwise the music does not express the inner essence, the will itself, but
only gives an inadequate imitation of its appearance, the way all essentially
imitative music does.”
Following what Schopenhauer has taught, we also understand music
as the language of the unmediated will and feel our imaginations stirred to
shape that spirit world which speaks to us invisibly and nonetheless with such
vital movement and to embody it for ourselves in an analogous illustration. By
contrast, image and idea, under the influence of a truly appropriate music,
reach an elevated significance. Thus, Dionysian art customarily works in two
ways on Apollonian artistic potential: music stimulates us to the metaphorical
viewing of the Dionysian universality, and music then permits that
metaphorical image to come forward with the highest significance.
From this inherently intelligible observation and without any deeper considerations
of unapproachable things, I conclude that music is capable of generating myth,
that is, the most meaningful example, and of giving birth in particular to
the tragic myth, the myth which speaks in metaphors of the
Dionysian insight. I have explained in the phenomenon of the lyric poet, how
the music in the lyric poet strives to make its essence known through him in
Apollonian pictures. If we now imagine that music at its highest intensity must
also seek to reach its highest representation, then we must consider it
possible that music also knows how to find the symbolic expression for its
essentially Dionysian wisdom. And where else will we have to look for this
expression, if not in tragedy and in the idea of the tragic generally?
From the essence of art as it is commonly understood according to
the single categories of illusion and beauty, it is genuinely impossible to
derive the tragic. Only with reference to the spirit of music do we understand
a joy in the destruction of the individual. For in particular examples of such
a destruction is made clear to us the eternal phenomenon of Dionysian art,
which brings into expression the will in its omnipotence out from behind, so to
speak, the principio individuationis, the eternal life beyond all
appearances and in spite of all destruction. The metaphysical joy in the tragic
is a translation of the instinctive unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the
language of the image: the hero, the highest manifestation of the will, is
destroyed, and we are happy at that, because, after all, he is only an
illusion, and the eternal life of the will is not disturbed by his destruction.
“We believe in eternal life,” so tragedy calls out, while the music is the
direct idea of this life. The work of the plastic artist has an entirely
different purpose: here Apollo overcomes the suffering of the individual
through the bright exaltation in the eternity of the illusion. Here
beauty is victorious over the suffering inherent in life. The pain is, in a
certain sense, brushed away from the face of nature. In Dionysian art and in
its tragic symbolism this same nature speaks to us with its true, undisguised
voice: “Be as I am! Under the incessant changes in phenomena, the eternally
creative primordial mother, eternally forcing things into existence, eternally
satisfied with the changing nature of appearances!”
17
Dionysian art thus wishes to convince us of the eternal delight in
existence: only we are to seek this delight, not in appearances, but behind
them; we are to recognize how everything which comes into being must be ready
for painful destruction; we are forced to gaze directly into the terror of individual
existence—and nonetheless are not to become paralyzed: a metaphysical consolation
tears us momentarily out of the hustle and bustle of changing forms. For a
short time we really are the primordial essence itself and feel its unbridled
lust for and joy in existence; the struggle, the torment, the destruction of
appearances now seem to us necessary, on account of the excess of innumerable
forms of existence pressing and punching themselves into life and of
the exuberant fecundity of the world will. We are transfixed by the raging
barbs of this torment in the very moment when we become, as it were, one with
the immeasurable primordial delight in existence and when, in Dionysian
rapture, we sense the indestructible and eternal nature of this joy. In spite
of fear and pity, we are fortunate vital beings, not as individuals, but as
the one living being, with whose procreative joy we have been
fused.
The story of how Greek tragedy arose tells us now with clear
certainty how the Greeks’ tragic work of art really was born out of the spirit
of music. With this idea we think we have, for the first time, done justice to
the original and astonishing meaning of the chorus. At the same time, however,
we must concede that the significance of the tragic myth established previously
was never conceptually and transparently clear to the Greek poets, to say nothing
of the Greek philosophers. Their heroes speak to a certain extent more
superficially than they act; the myth really does not find its adequate objectification
in the spoken word. The structure of the scenes and the vivid images reveal a
deeper wisdom than the poet himself can grasp in words and ideas. We can make
the same observation about Shakespeare, whose Hamlet, for example, in a similar
sense speaks more superficially than he acts, so that we derive the doctrine of
Hamlet we discussed earlier, not from the words, but from the deeper view and
review of the totality of the work. With respect to Greek tragedy, which, of
course, comes to us only as a drama of words, I have even suggested that the
incongruity between myth and word can easily seduce us into considering it shallower
and more empty of meaning than it is and thus also into assuming a more
superficial effect than it must have had according to the testimony of the
ancients, for we easily forget that what the poet as a wordsmith could not
achieve, the attainment of the highest intellectualization and idealization of
myth, he could have achieved successfully at any moment as a creative musician!
Admittedly we are almost forced to recreate through scholarship the extraordinary
power of the musical effects in order to experience something of that incomparable
consolation necessarily characteristic of true tragedy. But we would
experience this superior musical power for what it is only if we ourselves were
Greeks; whereas, considering the entire development of Greek music in
comparison to the music we know and are familiar with—so infinitely richer by
comparison—we believe that we are hearing youthful songs of musical genius,
sung with only a timid sense of their power. The Greeks are, as the Egyptian
priests say, eternal children and, even in tragic art, only children who do not
know what a sublime toy has arisen under their hands, something which—will be
destroyed.
That struggle of the spirit of music for pictorial and mythic
revelation, which becomes increasingly intense from the beginning of the lyric
right up to Attic tragedy, suddenly breaks apart, right after it first attained
full luxuriant bloom and, so to speak, disappears from the surface of Hellenic
art, although the Dionysian world view born out of this struggle lives on in
the mysteries and, in the most amazing transformations and degenerations, never
stops attracting more serious natures to it. Is it not possible that one day it
will rise from its mystic depths as art once more?
At this point we are concerned with the question whether the power
whose opposition broke tragedy has sufficient force for all time to hinder the
artistic reawakening of tragedy and the tragic world view. If the old tragedy
was derailed by the dialectical drive for knowledge and for the optimism of
science, we might have to infer from this fact an eternal struggle
between the theoretical and the tragic world view,
and only after the spirit of science is taken right to its limits and its claim
to universal validity destroyed by the proof of those limits would it be
possible to hope for a rebirth of tragedy. For a symbol of such a cultural
form, we would have to set up Socrates the player of music, in the
sense talked about earlier. By this confrontation I understand with respect to
the spirit of science that belief, which first came to light in the person of
Socrates, that nature can be rationally understood and that knowledge has a
universal healing power.
Anyone who remembers the most immediate consequences of this
restless, forward-driving spirit of science will immediately recall how it destroyed
myth and how, through this
destruction, poetry was driven out of its naturally ideal soil as something
which from now on was without a home. If we have correctly ascribed
to music the power to be able to bring about out of itself a rebirth of myth,
then we will also have to seek out the spirit of science on the path where it
has its hostile encounter with the myth-creating power of music. This occurred
in the development of the new Attic dithyramb, whose music no
longer expressed the inner essence, the will itself, but only gave back an
inadequate appearance in an imitation delivered through ideas. From such
inwardly degenerate music those with a true musical nature turned away with the
same aversion which they had shown when confronted by the art-killing attitude
of Socrates. The instinct of Aristophanes, which had such a sure grasp, was certainly
right when he linked together Socrates himself, the tragedies of Euripides, and
the music of the new writers of dithyrambs, hating each of them equally and
smelling in all three phenomena the characteristics of a degenerate culture.
Through that newer dithyramb, music was, in an outrageous manner, turned into a
mimetic demonstration of appearances, for example, a battle, a storm at sea,
and in the process was certainly robbed of all its power to create myths. For
when music seeks to arouse our indulgence only by compelling us to look for external
analogies between an event in life and nature and certain rhythmic figures and
characteristic musical sounds, when our understanding is supposed to be
satisfied with the recognition of these analogies, then we are dragged down
into a mood in which a conception of the mythic is impossible, for
myth desires to be vividly felt as a single instance of universality and truth
staring into the infinite. Truly Dionysian music confronts us as such a
universal mirror of the world will: that vivid event reflected in this mirror
widens out at once for our feelings into the image of an eternal truth. By
contrast, in the sound painting of the newer dithyramb such a vivid event is
immediately stripped of every mythic character. Now the music has become a
feeble copy of the phenomenon and, in the process, infinitely poorer than the
phenomenon itself. Through this impoverishment the phenomenon itself is even
lowered in our feelings, so that now, for example, a battle imitated in this
kind of music exhausts itself in marches, trumpet calls, and so forth, and our
imagination is held back by these very superficialities. Painting
with music is thus in every respect the opposite to the myth-creating power of
true music: through the former a phenomenon becomes even more impoverished than
it is; whereas, through Dionysian music the individual phenomenon becomes
richer and widens into a world picture. It was a powerful victory of the
non-Dionysian spirit when, in the development of the newer dithyramb, it alienated
music from itself and forced it down to be the slave of appearances. Euripides,
who, in a higher sense, must be considered a thoroughly unmusical nature, is
for this very reason an ardent supporter of the newer dithyrambic music and
uses all its stock effects and styles with the open-handedness of a thief.
From another perspective we see the force of this un-Dionysian
spirit in action directing its effects against myth, when we turn our gaze
toward the way in which the presentation of character and
the psychological complexities increase alarmingly in the tragedies of
Sophocles. The character can no longer be allowed to broaden out into an
eternal type, but, by contrast, must come across as an individual because of
the artistic qualifications and shading and the most delicate clarity of every
line, so that the spectator generally no longer experiences the myth but the
commanding naturalism of the artist, his power of imitation. Here, as a result,
we also become aware of the victory of appearances over the universal and of
the delight in the particular, like an anatomical specimen, as it were. Already
we breathe the air of a theoretical world, which values the scientific insight
higher than the artistic reflection of a universal principle. The movement
along the line of increasingly typical characteristics quickly goes further.
While Sophocles still paints whole characters and yokes their sophisticated
development to myth, Euripides already paints only large individual character
traits, which are capable of expressing themselves in violent passions. In the
newer Attic comedy there are only masks with one expression, silly old men, deceived pimps, and mischievous
slaves in an inexhaustible repetition. Where now has the myth-building spirit
of music gone? What is still left for music now is music either of excitement
or of memory, that is, either a means of stimulating jaded and worn out nerves
or sound painting. As far as the first is concerned, the text is largely irrelevant.
Already in Euripides, when his heroes or chorus first start to sing, things get
really out of hand. What must it have been like with his impertinent successors?
However, the new un-Dionysian spirit manifests itself with the
utmost clarity in the conclusions of the newer plays. In the
old tragedy, the metaphysical consolation was there to feel at the conclusion.
Without that, the delight in tragedy generally cannot be explained. The sound
of reconciliation from another world echoes most purely perhaps in Oedipus
at Colonus. Now, once the genius of music
flew away from tragedy, tragedy is, in the strict sense of the term, dead: for
out of what are people now supposed to be able to create that metaphysical
consolation? Consequently, people looked for an earthly solution to tragic
dissonance. After the hero was sufficiently tortured by fate, he received a
well-earned reward in an impressive marriage, in divine tributes. The hero
became a gladiator, to whom people occasionally gave his freedom, after he had
been well beaten and was covered with wounds. The deus ex machina moved in to replace
metaphysical consolation. I don’t wish to claim that the tragic world view was
completely destroyed everywhere by the surging spirit of the un-Dionysian: we
know only that it must have fled out of art into the underworld, so to speak,
degenerating into a secret cult. But over the widest surface area of Hellenic
existence raged the consuming wind of that spirit which announces itself in
that form of “Greek serenity” to which I have already referred earlier, as an
impotent, unproductive delight in existence. This cheerfulness is the opposite
of the marvellous “naïveté” of the older Greeks, which we must see,
in accordance with its given characteristics, as the flowering of Apollonian
culture, blossoming out of a dark abyss, as the victory over suffering and the
wisdom of suffering, which the Hellenic will gains through its ability to
mirror beauty. The noblest form of that other form of “Greek serenity,” the
Alexandrian, is the cheerfulness of the theoretical man. It
manifests the same characteristic features I have just derived out of the spirit
of the un-Dionysian—it fights against Dionysian wisdom and art; it strives to
dissolve myth; in place of a metaphysical consolation, it sets an earthy consonance,
indeed, a deus ex machina of its own, namely, the god of machines
and crucibles, that is, the forces of nature spirits, recognized and used in
the service of a higher egoism; it believes in correcting the world through
knowledge, in a life guided by science, and thus is really in a position to confine
the individual man within the narrowest circle of soluble problems, inside
which he can cheerfully say to life: “I want you. You are worth knowing.”
18
It’s an eternal phenomenon: the voracious will always finds a way
to keep its creatures alive and to force them on to further living by an
illusion spread over things. One man is fascinated by the Socratic desire for
knowledge and the delusion that with it he will be able to heal the eternal
wound of existence. Another is caught up by the seductive veil of artistic
beauty fluttering before his eyes, still another by the metaphysical consolation
that underneath the hurly-burly of appearances eternal life flows on
indestructibly, to say nothing of the more common and almost even more powerful
illusions which the will holds ready at all times. In general, these three
stages of illusion are only for nobly endowed natures, those who especially
feel with a more profound reluctance the weight and difficulty of existence and
who have to be deceived out of this reluctance by these exquisite stimulants.
Everything we call culture consists of these stimulants: depending on the
proportions of the mixture we have a predominantly Socratic or artistic or tragic culture—or
if you’ll permit historical examples—there is either an Alexandrian or a
Hellenic or a Buddhist culture.
Our entire modern world is trapped in the net of Alexandrian
culture and recognizes as its ideal the theoretical man, equipped
with the highest intellectual powers and working in the service of science, a
man for whom Socrates is the prototype and progenitor. All our methods of
education originally have this ideal in view; every other existence has
struggled on with difficulty alongside this ideal as a way of life we permit,
not as one we desire. For a long time now, in an almost frightening sense, an
educated person here has been found only in the form of the scholar. Even our
poetic arts have had to develop out of scholarly imitations, and in the
important effect of rhyme we recognize still the development of our poetical
form out of artificial experiments with what is essentially a really scholarly
language, not one native to us. To a true Greek how incomprehensible Faust would
have to have appeared, the man of modern culture, inherently intelligible to
us, who storms dissatisfied through all faculties, that Faust whose drive for
knowledge makes him devoted to magic and the devil. We have only to stand him
beside Socrates for comparison in order to recognize that modern man is
beginning to have a premonition of the limits of that Socratic desire for
knowledge and is yearning for a coastline in the wide, desolate sea of
knowledge. When Goethe once remarked to Eckermann,
with reference to Napoleon, “Yes, my good man, there is also a productivity in
actions,” in a delightfully naive way he was reminding us that the
non-theoretical man is something implausible and astonishing to modern human
beings, so that, once again, it required the wisdom of a Goethe to find out
that such a strange form of existence is comprehensible, indeed, forgivable.
And now we should not conceal from ourselves what lies hidden in
the womb of this Socratic culture! An optimism that thinks itself all-powerful!
Well, people should not be surprised when the fruits of this optimism ripen,
when a society that has been thoroughly leavened with this kind of culture,
right down to the lowest levels, gradually trembles with an extravagant turmoil
of desires, when the belief in earthly happiness for everyone, when faith in
the possibility of such a universal knowledge culture gradually changes into
the threatening demand for such an Alexandrian earthly happiness, into the plea
for a Euripidean deus ex machina! People should take note: Alexandrian culture requires
a slave class in order to be able to exist over time, but with its optimistic
view of existence, it denies the necessity for such a class and thus, when the
effect of its beautiful words of seduction and reassurance about the “dignity
of human beings” and the “dignity of work” has worn off, it gradually moves towards
a horrific destruction. There is nothing more frightening than a barbarian
slave class which has learned to think of its existence as an injustice and is
preparing to take revenge, not only for itself, but for all generations. In the
face of such threatening storms, who dares appeal with sure confidence to our
pale and exhausted religions, which themselves in their foundations have degenerated
into scholarly religions, so that myth, the essential pre-condition for every
religion, is already paralyzed everywhere, and even in this area that
optimistic spirit which we have just described as the germ of destruction of
our society has gained control.
While the disaster slumbering in the bosom of theoretical culture
gradually begins to worry modern man, while he, in his uneasiness, reaches into
the treasure of his experience for ways to avert the danger, without himself having any
real faith in these means, and while he also begins to have a premonition of
the particular consequences for him, some great wide-ranging natures have, with
an incredible circumspection, known how to use the equipment of science itself
to set out the boundaries and restricted nature of knowledge generally and, in
the process, decisively to deny the claim of science to universal validity and
universal goals. Given proofs like this, the delusion which claims that with
the help of causality it can fathom the innermost essence of things has
for the first time become recognized for what it is. The immense courage and
wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer achieved the
most difficult victory, the victory over the optimism lying concealed in the
essential nature of logic, which is, in turn, the foundation of our culture.
While this logic, based on aeternae veritates [eternal truths] which it did not
consider open to objection, believed that all the riddles of the world could be
recognized and resolved and had treated space, time, and causality as totally
unconditional laws with the most universal validity, Kant showed how these
really served only to raise mere appearance, the work of Maja, to the single, highest reality and to set it in place
of the innermost and true essence of things and thus to make true knowledge of
this essence impossible, that is, in the words of Schopenhauer, to get the
dreamer to sleep even more soundly (World as Will and Idea, I, 498).
With this recognition there is introduced a culture which I venture to describe
as a tragic culture. Its most important distinguishing feature is that wisdom
replaces science as the highest goal, a wisdom which, undeceived by the
seductive diversions of science, turns its unswerving gaze onto the
all-encompassing picture of the world and, with a sympathetic feeling of love,
seeks in that world to grasp eternal suffering as its own suffering. Let us picture
for ourselves a generation growing up with this fearlessness in its gaze, with
this heroic push into what is tremendous; let us picture for ourselves the bold
stride of these dragon slayers, the proud audacity with which they turn their
backs on all the doctrines of weakness associated with that optimism, in order
“to live with resolution,” fully and completely. Would it not be necessary that
the tragic man of this culture, having trained himself for what is serious and
frightening, desire a new art, the art of metaphysical consolation, the tragedy,
as his own personal Helen of Troy, and to have to cry out with Faust:
With my
desire’s power, should I not call
Into this life the fairest form of all?
However, now that Socratic culture has been shaken on two sides
and can hang onto the sceptre of its
infallibility only with trembling hands, first of all by the fear of its own
consequences, which it is definitely beginning to sense and, in addition, because
it is itself no longer convinced with that earlier naive trust of the eternal
validity of its foundations, it’s a sorry spectacle how the dance of its
thinking constantly dashes longingly after new forms in order to embrace them
and then how, like Mephistopheles with the seductive Lamias, it
suddenly, with a shudder, lets them go again.70 That
is, in fact, the characteristic mark of that “fracture” which everyone is in
the habit of talking about as the root malady of modern culture, that
theoretical man is afraid of his own consequences and, in his dissatisfaction,
no longer dares to commit himself to the
fearful ice currents of existence. He runs anxiously up and down along the
shore. He no longer wants to have anything completely,
any totality with all the natural cruelty of things. That’s how
much the optimistic way of seeing things has mollycoddled him. At the same time
he feels how a culture which has been built on the principle of science must
collapse when it begins to become illogical, that is, when it
begins to run back once it is faced with its own consequences. Our art reveals
this general distress: in vain people use imitation to lean on all the great
productive periods and natures; in vain they gather all “world literature”
around modern man to bring him consolation and place him in the middle of
artistic styles and artists of all ages, so that he may, like Adam with the
animals, give them a name. But he remains an eternally hungry man, the “critic”
without joy and power, the Alexandrian man, who is basically a librarian and
copy editor and goes miserably blind from the dust of books and printing
errors.
19
We can designate the innermost meaning of this Socratic culture no
more precisely than when we call it the culture of opera, for in
this area this Socratic culture, with characteristic naïveté, has expressed
its wishes and perceptions, something astonishing to us, if we bring the
genesis of opera and the facts of the development of opera together with the
eternal truths of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. First, I bring to mind the
emergence of the stilo rappresentativo
[the representational style] and of recitative. Is it credible that
this entirely externalized opera music, something incapable of worship, could
be accepted and preserved with wildly enthusiastic favour,
as if it were the rebirth of all true music, during an age in which
Palestrina’s inexpressibly awe-inspiring and sacred music had just arisen?71 On
the other hand, who would make the diversion-loving voluptuousness of those
Florentine circles or the vanity of its dramatic singers responsible for such
an impetuously spreading love of opera? The fact that in the same age—indeed,
in the same peoples—alongside the vaulted structure of Palestrina’s harmonies,
which the entire Christian Middle Ages had developed, there awoke that passion
for a half-musical way of speaking—that I can explain only by some tendency
beyond art at work in the very nature of recitative.
To the listener who wishes to hear clearly the word under the
singing, there corresponds the singer who speaks more than he sings and who
intensifies the expressions of pathos in this half-singing. Through this
intensification of pathos he makes the words easier to understand and
overpowers that part of the music which remains. The real danger now
threatening him is that at an inopportune moment he may give the music the
major emphasis, so that the pathos in the speech and the clarity of the words
necessarily disappear at once. On the other hand, he always feels the urge for
musical release and a virtuoso presentation of his voice. Here the “poet” comes
to his assistance, the man who knows how to provide him sufficient opportunities
for lyrical interjections, repetitions of words and sentences, and so on,
places where the singer can now rest in the purely musical element, without
considering the words. This alternation of urgently emotional speech which is
only half sung and interjections which are all singing, which lies at the heart
of the stilo rappresentativo,
this rapidly changing effort at one moment to affect the understanding and imagination
of the listener and, at another, to work on his musical sensibility, is
something so completely unnatural and similarly so inwardly contradictory to
the Dionysian and Apollonian artistic drives that we must infer an origin of recitative
which lies outside all artistic instincts. According to this account, we can
define recitative as the mixing of epic and lyric performing, and, to be precise,
not at all in an inwardly consistent blending, which could not have been attained
with such entirely disparate things, but in the most external conglutination,
in the style of a mosaic, something the like of which has no model whatsoever
in the realm of nature and experience. But this was not the opinion of
those inventors of recitative. By contrast, they themselves, along with
their age, believed that through that stilo rappresentativo the secret of ancient music had
been resolved, that only through it could one explain the
tremendous effect of an Orpheus, Amphion,
indeed, even of Greek tragedy.72 The new style was
valued as the reawakening of the most effective music, the music of the ancient
Greeks; in fact, under the universal and totally popular conception of the
Homeric world as the primitive world, people could abandon
themselves to the dream that they had now climbed down once more into the
paradisal beginnings of humankind, in which music must necessarily have had
that superb purity, power, and innocence which the poets knew how to talk about
so movingly in their pastoral plays. Here we see into the innermost development
of this truly genuine modern style of art, the opera: a powerful need forcibly
creates an art, but it is a need of an unaesthetic sort, the yearning for the
idyllic, the belief in a primordial
existence of the artistic and good man. Recitative served as the rediscovered
language of that primordial man, and opera as the rediscovered land of that
idyllic or heroically good being, who at the same time follows a natural
artistic drive in all his actions, who sings at least something in everything
he has to say, so that, given the slightest emotional arousal, he immediately
sings out in full voice. For us now it is unimportant that contemporary
humanists used this newly created picture of the paradisal artist to
fight against the old church idea of human beings as inherently corrupt and
lost, so that opera is to be understood as the opposing dogma of good people,
something with which they simultaneously discovered a way of consoling
themselves against that pessimism to which the serious-minded people of that
time, given the horrifying uncertainties of all social conditions, were
attracted most strongly. It’s enough for us to recognize how the real magic and
thus the origin of this new artistic form lies in the satisfaction of an
entirely unaesthetic need, in the optimistic glorification of man as such, in
its view of primitive man as a naturally good and artistic man.
This operatic principle has gradually transformed itself into a threatening and
terrible demand, which we, faced with the socialist movement of the
present day, can no longer fail to hear. The “good primitive man” wants his
rights: what paradisal prospects!
Alongside this point I set still another equally clear
confirmation of my view that opera is constructed on the same principles as our
Alexandrian culture. Opera is the offspring of the theoretical man, of the
critical layman, not of the artist—one of the strangest facts in the history of
all the arts. It was the demand of essentially unmusical listeners that people
had to understand the words above all, so that a rebirth of music was only to
be expected when some way of singing was discovered according to which the
words of the text rule over the counterpoint the way a lord rules over his
servants. For the words, they claimed, are much nobler than the
accompanying harmonic system, just as the soul is much nobler than the body. In
the beginning of opera, the union of music, image, and word was treated
according to the amateurish, unmusical crudity of these views. The first
experiments with the meaning of this aesthetic were launched even in
distinguished amateur circles in Florence by the poets and singers patronized
there. The man who is artistically impotent produces for himself a form of art
precisely because he is the inherently inartistic man. Because he has no sense
of the Dionysian depths of music, for his own sake he transforms musical taste
into easy-to-understand verbal and musical rhetoric of the passions in the stilo rappresentativo and
into the voluptuousness of the art of singing; because he is incapable of
seeing a vision, he presses mechanics and decorative artists into his service;
because he has no idea how to grasp the true essence of the artist, he conjures
up in front of him the “artistic primitive man” to suit his own taste, that is,
the man who, when passionate, sings and speaks verse. He dreams himself back in
an age in which passion was sufficient to produce songs and poems, as if every
feeling is capable of creating something artistic. The precondition of opera is
a false belief about the artistic process; more precisely, it is that idyllic
faith that in reality every sensitive man is an artist. In keeping with the
sense of this belief, opera is the expression of lay amateurs in art, something
which dictates its laws with the cheerful optimism of the theoretical man.
If we wanted to bring together into a single conception both of
these ideas I have just described, which were at work in the origin of opera,
all we would have left to do is to speak of an idyllic tendency in
opera, and for that the only thing we would need to use is Schiller’s
way of expressing himself and his explanation. He claimed that nature and the
ideal are either an object of sorrow, when the former is
represented as lost and the latter as unattained, or both are an
object of joy, when they are represented as real. The first produces the elegy
in a narrower sense, and the other produces the idyll in its broadest sense.
Now we can immediately draw attention here to the common characteristic of both
of those ideas in the genesis of opera, that in them the ideal does not register
as unattained, and nature does not register as lost. According to this feeling,
there was a primordial time for man when he lay on the heart of nature and, in
this state of nature, at the same time attained the ideal of humanity in paradisal goodness
and artistry. We all are said to have descended from these perfect primitive
men; indeed, we still were their faithful image; we only had to cast some
things away from us in order to recognize ourselves once again as these primitive
people, thanks to a voluntary renunciation of superfluous scholarship, of
lavish culture. Through his operatic imitation of Greek tragedy, the educated
man of the Renaissance let himself be led
back to such a harmony of nature and the ideal, to an idyllic reality. He used
this tragedy, as Dante used Virgil, in order to be led right up to the gates of
paradise, while from this point on he strode even further on his own and passed
over from an imitation of the highest Greek art form to a
“restoration of all things,” to a replica of man’s original artistic world.73 What
a confident good nature there is in these audacious attempts, right in the
bosom of theoretical culture! Something to be explained only by the comforting
faith that “the essential man” is the eternally virtuous hero of opera, the
eternally piping or singing shepherd, who must always in the end rediscover
himself as such, should he find out at some time or other that he has really
lost himself for a while: the only fruit of that optimism which here arises out
of the depths of the Socratic world view, like a sweetly seductive fragrant
column of air.
Hence, among the characteristics of opera there is no sense at all
of that elegiac pain of an eternal loss; instead there is the cheerfulness of
eternal rediscovery, the comfortable joy in an idyllic reality, the truth of
which man can at least imagine for himself in every moment. In doing this, man
may perhaps at some point suspect that this imagined reality is nothing other
than a fantastically silly indulgence, at which anyone able to measure it
against the fearful seriousness of true nature and to compare it with the
actual primitive scenes of the beginnings of humanity would have to cry out in
disgust: Get rid of that phantom! Nevertheless, we would be deceiving ourselves
if we believed that such a flirtatious being as opera could be frightened off
simply by a powerful shout, like a ghost. Whoever wants to destroy opera must undertake
the struggle against that Alexandrine cheerfulness, which expresses its favourite idea
so naively in opera; in fact, opera is its real artistic form. But what can we
expect for art itself from the effect of a form of art whose origins do not lie
in the aesthetic realm at all but which have, by contrast, stolen from a half
moralistic sphere over into the sphere of art and which can deceive people
about this hybrid origin only now and then? On what juices does this parasitic
operatic being feed itself, if not from the sap of true art? Are we not to
assume that, among opera’s idyllic seductions, among its Alexandrine arts of
flattering, the highest task of art, the one we should truly call serious—saving
the eye from a glimpse into the horror of the night and through the healing
balm of illusion rescuing the subject from the spasms brought about by the
stirring of the will—would degenerate into a tendency to empty and scattered
diversion? What becomes of the eternal truths of the Dionysian and the
Apollonian in such a mixture of styles of the sort I have set down as the
essence of the stilo
rappresentativo,
where the music is considered the servant and the libretto the master, where
the music is compared to the body and the libretto to the soul, where the
highest goal at best will aim at a descriptive tone painting, as it was earlier
with the new Attic dithyramb, where the music is completely alienated from its
true dignity, which is to be a Dionysian world-mirror, so that the only thing
left for it is to imitate the essential forms of appearances, like a slave of
phenomena, and to arouse a superficial entertainment in the play of lines and
proportions? A rigorous examination shows how this fatal influence of opera on
music coincides precisely with the entire modern development of music; the
optimism lurking in the genesis of opera and in the essence of the culture
represented through opera has succeeded with alarming speed in stripping music
of its Dionysian world meaning and stamping on it a formally playful, amusing
character. This transformation can be compared only to something like the
metamorphosis of Aeschylean man into the Alexandrian cheerful man.
However, if in the explanation given above we have
been right to link the disappearance of the Dionysian spirit with an extremely
striking but so far unexplained transformation and degeneration of Greek man,
what hopes must revive in us when the surest favourable signs bring
us the guarantee of the reverse process, of the gradual awakening of
the Dionysian spirit in our contemporary world! It is not possible
that the divine power of Hercules should remain always impotent
in voluptuous bondage to Omphale.74 Out of the Dionysian
foundation of the German spirit a power has arisen which has nothing in common
with the most fundamental assumptions of Socratic culture, something which
those assumptions can neither explain nor excuse, but which instead is
experienced by this culture as something frightening, inexplicable, as
overpowering and hostile—that is, German music, above all as we
must understand it in its mighty solar orbit from Bach to
Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner. Even in the best of circumstances what can
the Socratism of our day, greedy for knowledge, begin to make of this
daemon rising out of the inexhaustible depths? Neither from the lacework or arabesques
of operatic melodies nor with the help of the arithmetical abacus of fugue and
contrapuntal dialectic will a formula reveal itself
in whose triple-powered light people can render that daemon obsequious and compel
it to speak. What a spectacle when our aestheticians nowadays, with
the hunting net of “beauty” all their own, strike at and try to catch that
musical genius romping around in front of them with incredible life, with
movements which will not be judged according to standards of eternal beauty any
more than of the sublime. We should inspect these patrons of music for a
moment, in person and at close quarters, when they cry out so tirelessly
“Beauty! Beauty!” to see whether, in the process, they look like discriminating
darling children of nature educated in the lap of beauty or whether they are
not, by contrast, seeking a deceptively euphemistic form for their own crudity,
an aesthetic pretext for their characteristically unfeeling
sobriety. Here, for example, I’m thinking of Otto Jahn.75 But
the liar and hypocrite should beware of German music, for in the midst of all
our culture it is precisely the one unalloyed, pure, and purifying fire spirit
out from which and towards which all things move in a double orbit, as in the
doctrine of the great Heraclitus of Ephesus: everything which we now call
culture, education, civilization must at some point appear
before the unerring judge Dionysus.76
Furthermore, let’s remember how the spirit of German
philosophy in Kant and Schopenhauer, streaming from the same springs,
was able to annihilate the contented joy in existence of scientific Socratism by
demonstrating its boundaries, how with this demonstration an infinitely deeper
and more serious consideration of ethical questions and of art was introduced,
which we can truly describe as Dionysian wisdom conceptually understood.
Where does the mystery of this unity between German music and German philosophy
point if not to a new form of existence, about whose meaning we can inform
ourselves only by speculating on the basis of analogies with the Greeks? For
the Greek model has this immeasurable value for us who stand on the border line
between two different forms of existence—in it are also stamped all those
transitions and struggles in a classically instructive form, except that, to
use an analogy, we are, as it were, living through the great high ages of Greek
being in the reverse order: for
example, we seem to be moving now out of an Alexandrian period backwards into a
period of tragedy. At the same time, we feel as if the birth of a tragic time
period for the German spirit only means a return to itself, a blessed
re-discovery of self, after hugely invasive forces from outside had for a long
time forced it into servitude under their form, that spirit which, so far as
form is concerned, had lived in helpless barbarism. And now finally, after its
return home to the original spring of its being, it can dare to stride in here
before all peoples, bold and free, without the guiding reins of a Romanesque
civilization. If only it can now understand how to keep learning continuously
from a single people, the Greeks; being at all capable of learning from them is
already a high honour and a remarkable distinction. And when have we
needed these most eminent of mentors more than now, when we are
experiencing the rebirth of tragedy and are in danger of not
knowing where it is coming from and of being incapable of interpreting where it
wants to go?
20
At some point under the eyes of an incorruptible judge we may
determine in what age and in which men up to now the German spirit has
struggled most powerfully to learn from the Greeks, and if we can assume with
confidence that this extraordinary praise must be awarded to the noblest cultural
struggles of Goethe, Schiller, and Winckelmann, then we would certainly have to
add that, since that time and the most recent developments of that battle, the
attempt to attain a culture and to reach the Greeks by the same
route has become incomprehensibly weaker and weaker.77 In
order to avoid being forced into total despair about the German spirit, should
we not conclude from all this that in some important point or other even those
fighters could not succeed in penetrating into the core of the Hellenic spirit
and creating a lasting bond of love between German and Greek culture? Perhaps
an unconscious recognition of this failure even gives rise in more serious
natures to the enervating doubt whether, after such predecessors, they could go
even further than those men had along this cultural path and reach their goal
at all. For that reason since that time we’ve seen the judgment about the
cultural value of the Greeks degenerate in the most disturbing way. We can hear
expressions of sympathetic condescension in the most varied encampments of the
spirit and of the lack of spirit [des Geistes und
des Ungeistes]. In other places a completely
ineffectual sweet talk flirts with “Greek harmony,” “Greek beauty,” and “Greek
cheerfulness.” And precisely in the circles which could dignify themselves by
drawing tirelessly from the Greek river bed in order to benefit German culture—in
the circles of teachers in the institutes of higher education—people have
learned best to come to terms with the Greeks early and in a comfortable
manner, not rarely to the point of sceptically abandoning
the Hellenic ideal and totally reversing the real purpose of classical studies.
In general, anyone in those circles who has not completely exhausted himself in
the effort to be a dependable corrector of old texts or a microscopic studier
of language, like some natural historian, may perhaps even seek to acquire
Greek antiquity “historically,” alongside other antiquities, but in any case
following the methods of our present academic historical writing, along with
its supercilious expressions. If, as a result, the real cultural power of the
institutions of higher learning has certainly never before been lower and
weaker than at present, if the “journalist,” the paper slave of the day, has
won his victory over the professors in every respect, so far as culture is
concerned, and the only thing still left for the latter is the by-now
frequently experienced metamorphosis which has them also moving around these
days, to speak in the style of a journalist, with the “light elegance” of this
sphere, like cheerful, well-educated butterflies, then how awkward and
confusing it must be for those educated in this manner and living in such a
present to stare at something which may be understood only by an analogy to the
most profound principles of the as yet unintelligible Hellenic genius, the
revival of the Dionysian spirit and the rebirth of tragedy. There is no other
artistic period in which so-called culture and true art have stood more
alienated from and averse to each other than what we witness with our own eyes
nowadays. We understand why such a weak culture despises true art, for it fears
such art will destroy it. But surely after being able to taper off into such a
delicate and slight point as our contemporary culture, a complete cultural
style, that is, the Socratic-Alexandrian, must
have run its full life. When heroes like Schiller and Goethe could not succeed
in breaking down that enchanted door which leads to the Hellenic magic
mountain, when for all their most courageous struggles they reached no further
than that yearning gaze which Goethe’s Iphigeneia sent
from barbaric Tauris over the sea towards
her home, what is left for the imitators of such heroes to hope for, unless
from some totally different side, untouched by all the efforts of previous
culture, the door might suddenly open for them on its own—to the accompaniment
of the mysterious sound of the reawakened music of tragedy?
Let no one try to detract from our belief in a still imminent
rebirth of Hellenic antiquity, for that is the only place where we find our
hope for a renewal and reformation of the German spirit through the fiery magic
of music. What would we otherwise know to name which amid the desolation and
weariness of contemporary culture could awaken some comforting expectation for
the future? We peer in vain for a single, powerful, branching root, for a spot
of fertile and healthy soil: everywhere dust, sand, ossification, decay. Here a
desperate, isolated man could not choose a better symbol than the knight with
Death and the Devil, as Dürer has drawn him
for us, the knight in armour with the hard
iron gaze, who knows how to make his way along his terrible path, without being
dismayed at his horrific companions, and yet without any hope, alone with his
horse and hound. Such a Dürer knight was
our Schopenhauer: he lacked all hope, but he wanted the truth.
There is no one like him.78
But how suddenly that wilderness of our exhausted culture I have
just so gloomily sketched out changes when the Dionysian magic touches it! A
tempest seizes everything worn out, rotten, broken apart, and stunted, wraps it
in a red whirling cloud of dust, and, like a vulture, lifts it
up into the air. In our bewilderment, our eyes seek out what has disappeared,
for what they see has risen up, as if from oblivion, into golden light, so full
and green, so richly alive, so immeasurable and full of longing. Tragedy sits
in the midst of this superfluity of life, suffering, and joy; with
awe-inspiring delight it listens to a distant melancholy song, which tells of
the mothers of being whose names sound out: Delusion, Will, Woe. Yes, my friends, believe
with me in the Dionysian life and in the rebirth of tragedy. The age of the
Socratic man is over: crown yourselves with ivy, take the thyrsus stalk in your
hand, and don’t be amazed when tigers and panthers lie down fawning at your
feet. Only now you must dare to be tragic men, for you are to be redeemed. You
are to lead the Dionysian celebratory procession from India to Greece! Arm
yourselves for a hard battle, but have faith in the miracles of your god!
21
Moving back from this tone of exhortation into a mood suitable for
contemplation, I repeat that only from the Greeks can we learn what such a
miraculously sudden awakening of tragedy can mean for the innermost,
fundamental life of a populace. It is the people of the tragic mysteries who
fight the Persian wars, and then, in turn, the people who
carried on these wars use tragedy as an essential potion in their recovery.79 Who
would have suspected that these particular people, after being stirred right to
their innermost being for several generations by the strongest paroxysms of the
Dionysian daemon, still had such a regular and powerful outpouring
of the simplest political feeling, the most natural instinctive emotion for
their homeland, the original manly desire to fight? Nonetheless, if we always
sense in every remarkable Dionysian arousal which takes hold of its surroundings
how Dionysian release from the shackles of individuality registers at first as
a heightened restriction of the political instinct, all the way to indifference
and even hostility, it is also true that, on the other hand, Apollo, the nation
builder, is also the genius of the principium
individuationis and that a sense of state and homeland
cannot survive without an affirmation of the individual personality. From orgiastic
experience there is only one way out for a people, the route to Indian Buddhism,
which, with its longing for nothingness, in order to be endurable, generally requires
those rare ecstatic states with their ascent above space, time, and individuality,
just as these states, in their turn, demand a philosophy which teaches people
to use some idea to overcome the unimaginable dreariness of intermediate
states. In cases where the political drives are considered absolutely valid,
it’s equally necessary for a people to turn to a path of the most extreme
secularization. The most magnificent but also the most terrifying example of
this is the Roman empire.
Standing between India and Rome and forced to make a tempting
choice, the Greeks succeeded in inventing a third form in classical purity. Of
course, they did not make use of it for long themselves, but for that very
reason they made it immortal. The fact that the darlings of the gods die early
holds in all things, but it’s equally certain that then they live among the
gods forever. So people should not demand from the noblest thing of all
that it should possess the hard-wearing durability of leather; that crude
toughness characteristic of the Roman national impulses, for example, probably
does not belong to the necessary predicates of perfection. But if we ask what
remedies made it possible for the Greek in their great period, with the
extraordinary strength of their Dionysian and political drives, not to exhaust
themselves either with an ecstatic brooding or in a consuming pursuit of world
power and worldly honour, but to reach that marvellous mixture—just
as a noble wine makes one feel fiery and meditative at the same time—then we
must keep in mind the immense power of tragedy, which stimulated the entire
life of the people, purifying it and giving it release. We will first sense its
highest value when, as with the Greeks, it confronts us as the essence of all
prophylactic healing potions, as the mediator adjudicating between the
strongest and inherently most disastrous characteristics of a people.
Tragedy draws the highest musical ecstasy into itself, so that,
with the Greeks, as with us, it immediately brings music to its culmination.
But then it places the tragic myth and the tragic hero next to the music, and
he then, like a powerful Titan, takes the whole Dionysian world on his back and
thus relieves us of it. On the other hand, with the same tragic myth, in the
person of the tragic hero, tragedy knows how to redeem us from the greedy pressure
for this existence and with a warning hand reminds us of another state of being
and a higher pleasure for which the struggling hero, filled with foreboding, is
preparing himself, not through his victory, but through his destruction.
Tragedy places between the universal validity of its music and the listener
sensitive to the Dionysian an awe-inspiring parable—the myth—and with that awakens
an illusion, as if the music is only the production’s highest device for
bringing life to the plastic world of the myth. Trusting in this noble deception,
tragedy can now move its limbs in the dithyrambic dance and abandon itself
unconsciously to an ecstatic feeling of freedom; without that deception it
would not dare to revel in the very essence of music. The myth protects us from
the music, while it, by contrast, immediately gives the music its highest
freedom. In return, the music gives back to the tragic myth, as a return gift,
an urgent and convincing metaphysical significance, of a kind which word and
image could never attain without that unique assistance, and through the music,
in particular, there comes over the spectator of tragedy that certain
presentiment of the highest joy, the road to which leads through destruction
and negation, so that he thinks what he hears is like the innermost abyss of
things speaking to him out loud.
If in these last sentences I have perhaps been able to provide
only a provisional expression of this difficult idea, something immediately
understandable to few people, at this particular point I cannot refrain from
urging my friends to a further attempt and from asking them with a single
example of our common experience to prepare themselves to recognize a general
principle. With this example, I am not referring to those who use
the images of the action in the scene, the words and emotions of those doing
the acting, so that with this help they can come closer to the feeling of the
music, for none of these people speaks music as a mother tongue, and, for all
that help, they proceed no further than the lobbies of musical perception, without
ever being entitled to touch its innermost shrine. Some of these who
take this road, like Gervinus, do not even succeed
in reaching the lobby.80 No,
I must turn only to those who have an immediate relationship with music, who
find in it, as it were, their mother’s womb and stand bound up with things
almost exclusively through an unconscious musical relationship. To these true musicians
I direct the question: Can they imagine a person capable of perceiving the
third act of Tristan and Isolde purely
as an immense symphonic movement, getting no help from words and images, without suffocating from a convulsive spreading of all the wings
of the soul?81 A
man who, as in this case, has set his ear, so to speak, on the heart chambers
of the world’s will, who feels in himself the raging desire for existence
pouring forth into all the veins of the world as a thundering rainstorm or as
the most delicately spraying brook—would such a man not fall apart on the spot?
Could he endure hearing in the suffering glass case of his human individuality
the echo of countless cries of desire and woe from the “wide space of the
world’s night,” without, in the midst of this shepherd’s medley of metaphysics,
inexorably flying off for refuge to his primordial home? But what if
nonetheless such a work can be perceived as a totality, without the denial of
individual existence, what if such a creation could be produced without
shattering its creator—where do we get the solution to such a contradiction?
Here, between our highest musical excitement and that music, the
tragic myth and the tragic hero interpose themselves, basically only as a
metaphor for the most universal facts of all, about which only music can speak
directly. However, if we felt as purely Dionysian beings, then myth would be entirely
ineffectual as a metaphor and would remain beside us unnoticed. It would not
make us turn our ears away for an instant from listening to the echo of the universalia ante rem [the
universal before the fact]. But here the Apollonian power breaks through, preparing for the reintegration of
the almost shattered individuality with the healing balm of a blissful illusion.
Suddenly we think we still see only Tristan, motionless and dazed, as he asks
himself, “The old melody, what does it awaken for me?” And what earlier struck
us as an empty sigh from the centre of being now only wishes to say to us something
like “the barren, empty sea.” And where we breathlessly imagined we were dying
in a convulsive inner paroxysm of all our feelings with only a little linking
us to this existence, now we hear and see only the hero mortally wounded and
yet not dying, with his cry full of
despair, “Longing! Longing! In death still yearning, and
not to die for very longing!” And when earlier, after such an
excess and such a huge number of consuming torments, the jubilation of the horns,
almost like the highest agony, cuts through our hearts, there stands between us
and this “jubilation in itself” the celebrating Kurwenal,
turned towards the ship which carries Isolde. No
matter how powerful the pity gripping us inside, this pity nonetheless saves
us, in a certain sense, from the primordial suffering of the world, just as the
symbolic picture of the myth saves us from the immediate look at the highest
world idea, just as the idea and the word save us from the unrestrained
outpouring of the unconscious will. Because of that marvelous Apollonian deception
it seems to us as if the empire of music itself confronted us as a plastic
world, as if in it only Tristan’s and Isolde’s destiny
had been formed and stamped out in pictures, as in the most delicate and expressive
of all material.
Thus the Apollonian rescues us from Dionysian universality and
delights us with individuals. It attaches our aroused feelings of sympathy to
them, and with them it satisfies our sense of beauty, which longs for great and
awe-inspiring forms; it parades images of life before us and provokes us to a
thoughtful grasp of the kernel of life contained in them. With the immense
power of image, idea, ethical instruction, and sympathetic arousal, the Apollonian
lifts man up out of his ecstatic self-destruction and blinds him to the universality
of the Dionysian process, leading him to the delusion that he is watching just
one image of the world—for example, Tristan and Isolde—and
that through the music he is only supposed to see it even
better and more inwardly. What can the healing magic of Apollo
not achieve, if it can even arouse in us this delusion, so that it seems as if
the Dionysian is really working to serve the Apollonian and is capable of
intensifying its effects— in fact, as if the music were even essentially an
artistic presentation of an Apollonian content?
With that pre-established harmony which reigns between the perfect
drama and its music, drama attains a supreme degree of vividness, something
which verbal drama otherwise could not approach. As in the independently moving
melodic lines all the living forms in the scene simplify themselves in front of
us into the clarity of curved lines, the juxtaposition of these lines sounds
out to us in the harmonic changes which sympathize in the most delicate way
with the action as it moves forward. While this happens, the relation of things
becomes immediately perceptible to us in a more sensuously perceptible way,
which has nothing abstract about it at all, as we also recognize through it
that only in these relations does the essence of a character and of a melodic
line clearly reveal itself. And while the music compels us in this way to see
more and more profoundly than ever and the scenic action spreads itself in
front of us like a delicate spider’s web, for our spiritual inward-gazing eye
the world of the stage is just as infinitely widened as it is illuminated from
within. What could a word poet offer analogous to this—someone who struggles
with a very imperfect mechanism in indirect ways to attain with word and idea
that inner expansion of the vivid world of the stage and its inner illumination?
Musical tragedy, of course, also uses the word, but at the same time it can set
beside it the fundamental basis and birth place of the word and reveal to us
from inside what that word has become.
But nonetheless we could just as surely claim about this depiction
of the action that it is only a marvellous appearance, i.e., that
previously mentioned Apollonian illusion, through whose effect we
are to be relieved of the Dionysian surge and excess. In fact, the relationship
between music and drama is fundamentally the very reverse—the music is the
essential idea of the world, the drama only a reflection of this idea, an
isolated silhouette. That identity between the melodic line and the living
form, between the harmony and the relations of the characters in that form, is
true in a sense opposite to what it might seem to be for us as we look at
musical tragedy. We may well stir up the form in the most visible way, enliven
and illuminate it from within, but it always remains only an appearance, from
which there is no bridge leading to true reality, into the heart of the world.
But music speaks out from this heart, and although countless appearances of
that sort could clothe themselves in the same music, they would never exhaust
its essence, but would always be only its external reflection. Of course, for
the complex relationship between music and drama nothing is explained and
everything is confused by the popular and entirely false contrast between the
soul and the body. But particularly among our aestheticians it’s the unphilosophical crudity of that contrast which seems
to have become, who knows the reasons why, quite a well-known article of faith,
while they have learned nothing about the difference between the appearance and
the thing-in-itself or, for similarly unknown reasons, don’t want to learn
anything.
If one result of our analysis might be that the Apollonian in
tragedy, thanks to its deception, emerges completely victorious over the
Dionysian primordial element of music and makes use of this for its own
purposes, that is, for the highest dramatic clarity, a very important
reservation would naturally follow: at the most essential point that Apollonian
deception is broken up and destroyed. The drama, which, with the help of music,
spreads out in front of us with such inwardly illuminated clarity in all its
movements and forms, as if we were seeing the fabric on the loom while the shuttle
moves back and forth, achieves its effect as a totality which lies beyond
all the artistic workings of the Apollonian. In the total effect of tragedy
the Dionysian regains its superiority once more. Tragedy ends with a tone which
never could resound from the realm of Apollonian art. And as that happens, the
Apollonian illusion reveals itself for what it is, as the veil which, so long
as the tragedy is going on, has covered the essentially Dionysian effect. But
this Dionysian effect is nonetheless so powerful that at the end it drives the
Apollonian drama itself into a sphere where it begins to speak with Dionysian
wisdom and where it denies itself and its Apollonian visibility. So we could
truly symbolize the complex relationship between the Apollonian and the
Dionysian in tragedy with the fraternal bond between both divinities: Dionysus
speaks the language of Apollo, but Apollo finally speaks the language of
Dionysus, and with that the highest goal of tragedy and art in general is attained.
22
An attentive friend should remind himself in a pure and unconfused
manner, from his own experience, of a truly musical tragedy. I think I have described
what this effect is like, attending to both aspects of it in such a way that he
will now know how to interpret his own experience for himself. For he will
recall how, confronted with the myth unfolding in front of him, he felt himself
raised up to some sort of omniscience, as if now the visual power of his eyes
was not merely a force dealing with surfaces but was capable of penetrating within,
and as if, with the help of the music, he could now see in front him the turbulent
feelings of the will, the war of motives, the growing storm of passions as something
which is, as it were, sensuously present, like an abundance of living lines and
figures in motion, and thus as if he could plunge into the most delicate
secrets of unknown emotions. As he becomes conscious of the highest intensification
of his instincts which aim for clarity and transfiguration, nonetheless he
feels with equal certainty that this long series of Apollonian artistic effects
does not produce that delightful resignation of will-less
contemplation which the sculptor and the epic poet—in other words, the genuine
Apollonian artists—bring out in him with their works of art, that is, the
justification of the world of the individuatio [individual] attained
in that contemplation, which is the peak and essence of Apollonian art. He
looks at the transfigured world of the stage and yet denies it. He sees the
tragic hero in front of him in epic clarity and beauty and, nonetheless, takes
pleasure in his destruction. He understands the events on stage to their
innermost core and joyfully flies off into the incomprehensible. He
feels the actions of the hero as justified and is, nonetheless, still more
uplifted when these actions destroy the one who initiated them. He shudders in
the face of the suffering which the hero is about to encounter and, nonetheless,
because of it has a premonition of a higher, much more overpowering joy. He
perceives more things and more profoundly than ever before and yet wishes he
were blind. Where would we be able to derive this miraculous division of the
self, this collapse of the Apollonian climax, if not from Dionysian magic,
which, while it apparently excites the Apollonian feelings to their highest
point, nevertheless can still force this exuberance of Apollonian art into its
service? The tragic myth can only be understood as a symbolic
picture of Dionysian wisdom by means of Apollonian art. It leads the world of
appearances to its limits, where it denies itself and once again seeks to fly
back into the womb of the true and single reality, at which point it seems,
with Isolde, to sing its metaphysical swan song.
In the
surging torrents
of seas of my desires,
in resounding tones
of fragrant waves,
in the blowing All
of the world’s breath—
to drown, to sink down,
to lose consciousness—
the highest joy.82
In this way we recall, from the experiences of the truly aesthetic
listener, the tragic artist himself, as he, like a voluptuous divinity of individuationis [individuation], creates his
forms, in which sense his work can scarcely be understood as an “imitation of
nature”—but then as his immense Dionysian drive devours this entire world of
appearances in order to allow us, through its destruction, to have a
premonition behind it of the primal and highest artistic joy in the womb of the
primordial One. Of course, our aestheticians don’t know what to write about
this return journey to our original home, about the fraternal bond of the two
brother gods of art in tragedy, any more than they do about the Apollonian or
the Dionysian excitement of the listener, while they never weary of
characterizing as the essential feature of the tragic the struggle of the hero
with fate, the victory of a moral world order, or the purging of
the emotions achieved by tragedy. Such tireless efforts lead me to the thought
that in general they may be men incapable of aesthetic excitement, so that when
they hear a tragedy perhaps they think of themselves only as moral beings.
Since Aristotle, there has not yet been an explanation of the tragic effect
which could justify it on the basis of artistic conditions, of the aesthetic
capability of the listener. Sometimes pity and fear are supposed to be pushed
by the serious action to a discharge which brings relief. At other times, we
are supposed to feel enthusiastic and elevated because of the victory of good
and noble principles, by the sacrifice of the hero, taking that as a moral
observation about the world. And just as I have no doubt that for countless men
that and only that is precisely the effect of tragedy, so it is equally clear
this reveals that all these people, along with their interpreting
aestheticians, have experienced nothing of tragedy as a supreme art.
That pathological purgation, the catharsis of Aristotle, which the philologists
are uncertain whether to count a medical or a moral phenomenon, brings to mind
a remarkable feeling of Goethe’s: “Without a lively pathological interest,” he
says, “I have also never succeeded in working on any kind of tragic situation,
and therefore I have preferred to avoid it rather than seek it out. Could it
perhaps be the case that among the merits of the ancients the highest degree of
the pathetic was also only aesthetic play for them, while with us the truth of
nature must be there as well, in order for such a work to be produced?” After
our marvellous experiences we can now answer yes to this profound
question, once we have experienced with wonder precisely this musical tragedy,
how truly the highest degree of the pathetic can be, for all that, only an
aesthetic game. For that reason, we are entitled to think that only now can the
primordial phenomenon of the tragic be described with some success. Anyone who
nowadays still provides explanations only in terms of those surrogate effects
from spheres beyond aesthetics and does not sense that he has risen above the
pathological and moralistic processes may well despair altogether of his aesthetic
nature. For that condition we recommend as an innocent substitute the interpretation
of Shakespeare the way Gervinus does it and
the diligent search for “poetic justice.”
So with the rebirth of tragedy the aesthetic listener is
also born again, in whose place up to this point a strange quid pro
quo habitually sat in the theatre space, with half moral and half
scholarly demands—the “critic.” In his sphere so far everything has been
synthetic and merely whitewashed with the appearance of life. The performing
artist, in fact, did not know any more what he could begin to do with such a
listener who behaved critically, and therefore he, together with the dramatist
or opera composer who inspired him, peered anxiously for the last remnants of
life in this demanding, barren creature incapable of enjoying itself. But up to
this point the general public has consisted of this sort of “critic.” Through
education and the press, the student, the school child, indeed even the most
harmless female creature has already been prepared, without being aware of it,
to perceive a work of art in a similar manner. The more noble natures among the
artists, faced with such a public, counted on exciting moral and religious
forces, and the call for “a moral world view” stepped in vicariously, where, in
fact, a powerful artistic magic should have entranced the real listener.
Alternatively, dramatists brought out a splendid and at least exciting trend in
contemporary political and social issues so vividly that the listener could
forget his critical exhaustion and let himself go with feelings similar to
those in patriotic or militaristic moments or in front of the speaker’s desk in
parliament or in judicial sentences for crimes and vices. And that alienation
from true artistic purposes necessarily led here and there directly to a
culture of bias. But here there stepped in, what in all artificial arts up to
now has intervened, a rapaciously quick loss of that very tendency, so that,
for example, the view that the theatre should be used as an institution for the
moral education of a people, something taken seriously in Schiller’s day, is
already counted among the incredible antiquities of an education which has been
superseded. As the critic came to rule in the theatre and concert, the
journalist in the schools, and the press in society, art degenerated into an
object of entertainment of the basest sort, and the aesthetic critic was used
as a way of binding together a vain, scattered, selfish, and, beyond that,
pitifully unoriginal social group, the meaning of which we can understand from
that parable of the porcupines in Schopenhauer, so there has never been a time when people have chattered so much about art and thought so
little of it.83 But
cannot we still associate with someone able to entertain himself with Beethoven
and Shakespeare? Let everyone answer this question according to his own
feelings: with his answer he will at any rate demonstrate what he imagines by
the word “culture,” provided he seeks to answer the question at all and has not
already been struck dumb with astonishment.
By contrast, many with a nobler and more naturally refined
ability, even if they also have gradually turned into critical barbarians in
the manner described above, could say something about an effect, as unexpected
as it is entirely incomprehensible, of the sort which a work like a happily successful
production of Lohengrin has
had on them, except perhaps they lacked any hand which could assist them with
advice and interpretation; thus, that incredibly different and totally
incomparable sensation which so shook them at the time remained a single
example and, after a short period of illumination, died out,
like a mysterious star.84 That
was the moment they had a presentiment of what an aesthetic listener is.
23
Anyone who wants an accurate test for himself to see how closely
related he is to the truly aesthetic listener or how much he belongs with the
Socratic-critical community could sincerely ask himself about the feeling with
which he receives some miracle presented on
stage. In that situation, for example, does he feel offended in his
historical sense, which organizes itself on strict psychological causality, or
does he, in a spirit of generosity, as it were, make a concession to the
miracle as something comprehensible in childhood but foreign to him, or does he
suffer anything else at all in that process? For in doing this he will be able
to measure how far, in general, he is capable of understanding the myth,
the concentrated world picture, which, as an abbreviation of appearance, cannot
work without the miracle. However, it’s likely that almost everyone in a strict
test would feel himself so thoroughly corrupted by the critical-historical
spirit of our culture that he could make the previous existence of the myth
credible only with something scholarly, with some mediating abstractions. But
without myth every culture forfeits its healthy creative natural power: only a
horizon surrounded with myth completes the unity of an entire cultural
movement. Only through myth are all the powers of the imagination and of
Apollonian dream rescued from their random wandering around. The images of myth
must be the unseen, omnipresent, daemonic sentries under whose care the young
soul matures and by whose signs a man interprets for himself his life and his
struggles. Even the state knows no more powerful unwritten laws than the
mythical foundation which guarantees its own connection to religion, its growth
out of mythic ideas.
Alongside that let us now place abstract people, those who are led
around without myths, and abstract education, abstract customs, abstract law,
the abstract state. Let us remember the disorderly roaming of the artistic
imagination which is not restrained by any secret myth. Let us
imagine a culture which has no fixed and sacred primordial seat but which is
condemned to exhaust all possibilities and to subsist on a meager diet
from all cultures—and there we have the present, the result of that Socratism whose
aim is to destroy myth.
And now the man without myth stands there, eternally hungry, in
the midst of all past ages, rummaging around and digging as he looks for roots,
even if he has to shovel for them in the most remote ancient times. What is
revealed in the immense historical need of this dissatisfied
modern culture, the gathering up of countless other cultures, the consuming
desire to know, if not the loss of myth, the loss of the mythic homeland, of
the mythic maternal womb? Let us ask ourselves whether the feverish and strange
agitation of this culture is something other than a starving man’s greedy
snatch-and-grab for food—and who would still want to give such a culture
anything, when nothing which it gobbles down satisfies it and when, at its
touch, the most powerful and healthiest nourishment habitually changes into
“history and criticism”?
We would even have to experience painful despair over our German
being, if it were already inextricably intermixed in a similar way with its
culture, or, indeed, if they had become a single unit, as we can observe, to
our horror, with civilized France. What for a long time constituted the great
merit of France and the cause of its huge superiority—that very unity of being
in people and culture—should make us, when we look at it, praise our good luck
that such a questionable culture as ours has had nothing in common up to this
point with the noble core of our people’s character. Instead of that, all our
hopes are reaching out yearningly towards the awareness that under this
restless cultural life and cultural convulsions twitching here and there lies
hidden a glorious, innerly healthy, and
age-old power, which naturally only begins to stir into powerful motion at
tremendous moments and then goes on dreaming once again about a future
awakening. Out of this abyss the German Reformation arose: in its choral music
there rang out for the first time the future style of German music. This choral
music of Luther’s sounded as profound, courageous, and spiritual, as
exuberantly good and tender, as the first Dionysian call rising up out of the
thickly growing bushes at the approach of spring. In answer to it came the
competing echo of that solemn exuberant procession of Dionysian throngs, whom
we have to thank for German music— and whom we will thank for the
rebirth of the German myth!
I know that now I have to take the sympathetic friend who is
following me up to a lofty place for lonely contemplation, where he will have
only a few travelling companions. By way of encouragement I call out to him
that we have to keep hold of those leaders who illuminate the way for us, the
Greeks. Up to now, in order to purify our aesthetic awareness, we have borrowed
from them both of those images of the gods, each of whom rules over his own specific artistic realm, and by considering
Greek tragedy, we came to an awareness of their mutual contact and
intensification. To us the downfall of Greek tragedy must appear to have occurred
through a remarkable tearing apart of both of these primordial artistic drives,
an event which was accompanied by a degeneration and transformation of the
character of the Greek people, something which demands from us some serious
reflection about how necessarily and closely art and people, myth and custom,
tragedy and the state are fundamentally intertwined. That downfall of tragedy
was at the same time the downfall of myth. Up to that point the Greeks were
instinctively compelled to tie everything they lived through immediately to
their myths—in fact, to understand that experience only through this link. In
that process, even the most recent present had to appear to them at once sub
specie aeterni [under the eye of eternity] and
thus, in a certain sense, to be timeless. In this stream of the timeless,
however, the state and art both plunged equally, in order to find in it rest
from the weight and greed of the moment. And a people—as well as a person, by
the way—is only valuable to the extent that it can stamp upon its experiences
the mark of the eternal, for in that way it is, as it were, relieved of the
burden of the world and demonstrates its unconscious inner conviction of the
relativity of time and of the true, that is, of the metaphysical meaning of
life. Something quite different from this happens when a people begins to
understand itself historically and to smash up the mythic bastions standing
around it. Tied in with this development is usually a decisive secularization,
a breach with the unconscious metaphysics of its earlier existence, along with
all ethical consequences. Greek art and especially Greek tragedy above all
checked the destruction of myth; people had to destroy them in order to be able
to live detached from their home soil, unrestrained in a wilderness of thought,
custom, and action. But now that metaphysical drive still tries to create, even
if in a toned-down form, a transfiguration for itself, in the Socratism of
science which pushes forward into life. But on the lower steps this very drive
led only to a feverish search, which gradually lost itself in a pandemonium of
myths and superstitions from all over the place, all piled up together, in the
middle of which, nonetheless, the Hellene sat with an unquenched heart, until
he understood to mask that fever with Greek cheerfulness and Greek negligence,
in the form of Graeculus, or to plunge completely into some stupefying
oriental superstition or other.
In the most obvious way, since the reawakening of
Alexandrian-Roman antiquity in the fifteenth century, after a long and
difficult to describe interval, we have come closer to this condition. Up on
the heights this same abundant desire for knowledge, the same insatiable
happiness in discovery, the same immense secularization, alongside a homeless
wandering around, a greedy thronging at foreign tables, a reckless idolizing of
the present, or an apathetic, numbed turning away, with everything sub specie saeculi [under the eye of the secular], of the
“present age”; these same symptoms lead us to suspect the same lack at the
heart of this culture, the destruction of myth. It seems hardly possible that
grafting on a foreign myth would have any lasting success, without in the
process irreparably damaging the tree. Perhaps it is at some point strong and
healthy enough to slice out that foreign element again with a dreadful
struggle, but usually it must waste away, infirm and faded, or live on in a
morbid state. We have such a high regard for the pure and powerful core of the
German being that we dare to expect from it, in particular, that elimination of
powerfully grafted foreign elements and consider it possible that the German
spirit will come back into an awareness of itself on its own. Perhaps some
people will think that spirit would have to start its struggle with the elimination
of the Romantic, and for that he could recognize an external preparation and
encouragement in the victorious courage and bloody glory of the recent war. But
the internal necessity must be sought in the competitive striving always to be
worthy of the noble pioneers on this road, including Luther just as much as our
great artists and poets. But let him never believe that he can fight similar
battles without his house gods, without his mythic homeland, without a
“bringing back” of all things German! And if the German in his hesitation
should look around him for a leader who will take him back again to his
long-lost homeland, whose roads and pathways he hardly knows any more—then let
him only listen to the sweet, enticing call of the Dionysian bird hovering
above him seeking to show him the way.
24
Among the characteristic artistic effects of musical tragedy we
had to stress an Apollonian illusion through which we are to
be rescued from immediate unity of being with the Dionysian music, while our
musical excitement can discharge itself in an Apollonian sphere and in a visible
middle world which interposed itself. By doing this we thought we had noticed
how, simply through this discharge, that middle world of the scenic action, the
drama in general, to a certain degree became visible and comprehensible from
within, in a way which is unattainable in all other Apollonian art, so that
here, where the Apollonian is energized and raised aloft, as it were, through
the spirit of the music, we had to acknowledge the highest intensification of
its power and, therefore, in that fraternal bond of Apollo and Dionysus the
peak of both the Apollonian and the Dionysian artistic aims.
Of course, the projected Apollonian image with this particular
inner illumination through the music does not achieve the effect characteristic
of the weaker degrees of Apollonian art, what epic or animated stone is capable
of, compelling the contemplating eye to that calm delight in the world of the
individual—in spite of a higher animation and clarity, that effect will not
permit itself to be attained here. We looked at drama and with a penetrating
gaze forced our way into the inner moving world of its motives—and nonetheless
for us it was as if only an allegorical picture passed before us, whose most
profound meaning we thought we could almost guess and which we wanted to pull
aside, like a curtain, in order to look at the primordial image behind it. The
brightest clarity of the image did not satisfy us, for this seemed to hide just
as much as it revealed. And while, with its allegorical-like revelation, it
seemed to promise to rip aside the veil, to disclose the mysterious background,
once again it was precisely that penetrating light illuminating everything
which held the eye in its spell and prevented it from probing more deeply.
Anyone who has not had this experience of having to watch and, at
the same time, of yearning to go above and beyond watching will have difficulty
imagining how definitely and clearly these two processes exist together and are
felt alongside each other, as one observes the tragic myth. However, the truly
aesthetic spectators will confirm for me that among the peculiar effects of
tragedy that co-existence may be the most remarkable. If we now translate this
phenomenon taking place in the aesthetic spectator into an analogous process in
the tragic artist, we will have understood the genesis of the tragic
myth. He shares with the Apollonian sphere of art the full joy in
appearances and in watching—at the same time he denies this joy and has an even
higher satisfaction in the destruction of the visible world of appearances. The
content of the tragic myth is at first an epic event with the glorification of
the struggling hero. But what is the origin of that inherently mysterious
feature, the fact that the suffering in the fate of the hero, the most painful
victories, the most agonizing opposition of motives, in short, the
exemplification of that wisdom of Silenus, or, expressing it aesthetically,
of the ugly and the dissonant, in so many countless forms, is presented with
such fondness, always renewed, and precisely in the richest and most youthful
age of a people, unless we recognize in all this a higher pleasure?
For the fact that in life things are really so tragic would not in
the least account for the development of an art form, if art is not only an
imitation of natural reality but a metaphysical supplement to that reality, set
beside it in order to overcome it. The tragic myth, insofar as it belongs to
art at all, also participates fully in this general purpose of art to provide
metaphysical transfiguration. But what does it transfigure, when it leads out
the world of appearance in the image of the suffering hero? Least of all the
“Reality” of this world of appearances, for it says directly to us: “Look here!
Look right here! This is your life! This is the hour hand on the
clock of your existence!” And did the myth show us this life in order to
transfigure it in front of us? If not, in what does the aesthetic joy consist
with which we allow those images to pass in front of us? I ask about aesthetic
delight and know full well that many of these images can in addition now and
then still produce a moral pleasure, for example, in the form of pity or a
moral triumph. But whoever wants to derive the effect of the tragic merely from
these moral origins, as, of course, has been customary in aesthetics for far
too long, should not think that, in so doing, he has then done anything for
art, which above all must demand purity in its realm. For an explanation of the
tragic myth the very first demand is that he seek that
joy characteristic of it in the purely aesthetic sphere, without reaching over
into the territory of pity, fear, and the morally sublime. How can the ugly and
dissonant, the content of the tragic myth, excite an aesthetic delight?
Here it is necessary for us to vault with a bold leap into a metaphysics of art, when I repeat an earlier
sentence—that existence and the world appear justified only as an aesthetic
phenomenon. It is in this sense that the tragic myth has to convince us that
even the ugly and dissonant are an artistic game, which the will, in the
eternal abundance of its joy, plays with itself. But there is a direct way to
make this primordial phenomenon of Dionysian art, which is so difficult to
comprehend, completely understandable and to enable one to grasp it
immediately, through the miraculous meaning of musical dissonance,
the way the music in general, set next to the world, is the only thing that can
give an idea of what it means to understand a justification of the world as an
aesthetic phenomenon. The joy which the tragic myth produces has the same
homeland as the delightful sensation of dissonance in music. The Dionysian,
together with its primordial joy felt even in pain, is the common birth womb of
music and the tragic myth.
Thus, is it not possible that we have made that difficult problem
of the tragic effect really much easier now that we have called on the relation
of musical dissonance to help us? For now we understand what it means in
tragedy to want to keep looking and at the same time to yearn for something
beyond what we see. We would have to characterize this condition in relation to
the artistic use of dissonance simply as the fact that we want to keep
listening and at the same time yearn to get beyond what we hear. That striving
for the infinite, the wing beat of longing associated with the highest delight
in clearly perceived reality, reminds us that in both states we must recognize
a Dionysian phenomenon, which always reveals to us all over again the playful
cracking apart and destruction of the world of the individual as the discharge
of primordial delight, in a manner similar to the one in which gloomy
Heraclitus compares the force constructing the world to a child who playfully
sets stones here and there, builds sand piles, and then knocks them down again.
And thus in order to assess the Dionysian capability of a people
correctly, we have to think not just about their music; we must also think
about their tragic myth as the second feature of that capacity. Given this
closest of relationships between music and myth, now we can in a similar way
assume that a degeneration and deprivation of one of them will be linked to a
decline in the other, if in a weakening of myth generally a waning of the
Dionysian capability really does manifest itself. But concerning both of these,
a look at the development of the German being should leave us in no doubt: in
the opera, as well as in the abstract character of our myth-deprived existence,
in an art which has sunk down to entertainment, as well as in a life guided by
concepts, that inartistic and equally life-draining nature of Socratic optimism
stands revealed. For our consolation, however, there were indications that, in
spite of everything, the German spirit rests and dreams in magnificent health,
profundity, and Dionysian power, undamaged, like a knight sunk down in slumber
in an inaccessible abyss. And from this abyss, the Dionysian song rises up to
us in order to make us understand that this German knight is also still
dreaming his age-old Dionysian myth in solemn, blissful visions. Let no one
believe that the German spirit has lost forever its mythic homeland,
when it still understands so clearly the voices of the birds which tell of that
homeland. One day it will find itself awake in all the morning freshness of an
immense sleep. Then it will kill dragons, destroy the crafty dwarf, and awake Brunnhilde—and even Wotan’s spear
itself will not be able to block its way!85
My friends, you who have faith in Dionysian music, you also know
what tragedy means to us. In it we have the tragic myth, reborn from music—and
in it you can hope for everything and forget what is
most distressing! The most painful thing, however, for all of us is
this—the long degradation under which the German genius, alienated from house
and home, has lived in service to that crafty dwarf. You understand my words—as
you will also understand my hopes as I conclude.
25
Music and tragic myth are equally an expression of the Dionysian
capacity of a people and are inseparable from each other. Both derive from an
artistic realm that lies beyond the Apollonian. Both transfigure a region in
whose joyful chords dissonance as well as the terrible
image of world fade delightfully away. Both play with the sting of
joylessness, trusting in the extreme power of their magical
arts. Through this play both justify the existence of even the
“worst of worlds.” Here the Dionysian shows itself,
measured against the Apollonian, as the eternal and primordial artistic force,
which, in general, summons the entire world of appearances into existence. In
its midst a new transfiguring illusion becomes necessary in order to keep alive
the living world of the individual. Could we imagine dissonance becoming
human—and what is a man other than that?—then this dissonance, in order to be
able to live on, would need a marvellous illusion, which covered it
with a veil of beauty over its essential being. This is the true
artistic purpose of Apollo, in whose name we put together all those countless
illusions of beautiful appearances which render existence at every moment
generally worth living and push us to experience the next moment.
But in this process, from that basis for all existence, from the
Dionysian bed rock of the world, only as much can come into the consciousness
of the human individual as can be overcome once more by that Apollonian power
of transfiguration, so that both of these artistic drives are compelled to
display their powers in a strictly mutual proportion, in accordance with the
law of eternal justice. Wherever Dionysian power rises up too impetuously, as
we are experiencing it, there Apollo must already have come down to us, hidden
in a cloud. The next generation may well see the richest of his beautiful
effects.
However, the fact that this effect is necessary each man will
experience most surely through his intuition, if he once, even if only in a
dream, feels himself set back into the life of the ancient Greeks. As he
wanders under high Ionic colonnades, glancing upwards to a horizon marked off
with pure and noble lines, with reflections of his transfigured form beside him
in shining marble, around him people solemnly striding or moving delicately,
with harmoniously resounding sounds and a speech of rhythmic gestures—faced
with this constant stream of beauty, would he not have to extend his hand to
Apollo and cry out: “Blessed Hellenic people! How great Dionysus must be among
you, if the Delphic god thinks such magic necessary to heal your dithyrambic
madness!” —To a person in such a mood as this,
however, an old Athenian, looking at him with the noble eye of Aeschylus, might
reply: “But, you strange foreigner, say this as well: How much these people
must have suffered in order to be able to become so beautiful! But now follow
me to the tragedy and sacrifice with me in the temple of both divinities.”
1Note that this first
section of the Birth of Tragedy was added to the book many
years after it first appeared, as the text makes clear. Nietzsche wrote this “Attempt
at Self-Criticism” in 1886. The original text, written in 1870-71, begins with
the Preface to Richard Wagner, the second major section in this text. [Back to Text]
2The
Battle of Wörth occurred
in August 1870. The German army defeated the French forces. [Back to Text]
3Nietzsche contracted a
serious and lingering illness while serving as a medical orderly with the
Prussian forces in the Franco-Prussian War. The illness forced him eventually
to give up his academic position. [Back to Text]
4In Greek mythology,
Dionysus, son of Zeus and the mortal Semele, was
the god of wine, associated with ecstatic and intoxicated group rituals. [Back to Text]
5Socrates:
(470-399 BC), Athenian philosopher famous for his devotion to challenging the
beliefs of his contemporaries with intense questioning. Also as the main
character in Plato’s early dialogues, Socrates becomes the chief spokesman for
a more rational understanding of life. [Back to Text]
6Epicurus:
(341-270 BC), Greek philosopher who stressed that the purpose of thinking was
the attainment of a tranquil, pain-free existence. [Back to Text]
7The German word Wissenschaft, a very important part of Nietzsche’s
argument, has a range of meanings: scholarship, science, scholarly research. In
this translation I have normally used science or scientific
knowledge or scholarship. The meaning of the term is by no
means confined to the physical sciences. [Back to Text]
8Richard
Wagner: (1813-1883), German composer and essayist, most famous for his
operas. Early in Nietzsche’s career he and Wagner (who met in 1868) were close
friends. [Back
to Text]
9. . . maenad-like: a maenad is an ecstatic
follower of the god Dionysus. [Back to Text]
10Pericles:
(495-429 BC) political leader of Athens at the height of its power; his Funeral
Oration commemorating those Athenians killed in the first year of the
Peloponnesian War, as it is described by the great contemporary historian
Thucydides (460-395 BC), celebrates the glories of Athens and its citizens. [Back to Text]
11Schopenhauer: Arthur
Schopenhauer (1788-1860), German philosopher whose work had a strong influence
on Nietzsche. [Back
to Text]
12Kant:
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), German philosopher, one of the most important
figures in the Enlightenment. [Back to Text]
13A quotation from
Goethe’s Faust II, 7438-9. The prose quotation
before these lines is from Section 18 of The Birth of Tragedy. [Back to Text]
14Zarathustra: the
name Nietzsche uses throughout his works for his reinterpretation of Zoroaster,
the ancient Persian prophet, in order to make him a spokesman for his own
ideas, notably in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1885),
from which these concluding paragraphs are quoted. [Back to Text]
15Apollo: in
Greek mythology the son of Zeus and Leto (hence
a half-brother of Dionysus), associated with the sun and prophecy. [Back to Text]
16Lucretius: Titus
Lucretius Carus (99 BC to 55 BC), Roman
philosopher and poet, author of De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). [Back to Text]
17Hans
Sachs: a historical person and a character portrayed in Richard Wagner’s
opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. [Back to Text]
18. . . the veil
of Maja: a phrase used by Schopenhauer
to describe a screen which exists between “the world inside my head and the
world outside my head.” [Back to Text]
19. . . creator”: this
quotation comes from Schiller’s poem which provides the words for Beethoven’s Ode
to Joy. Eleusinian mysteries: secret ecstatic religious ceremonies. [Back to Text]
20. . . head of
Medusa: In Greek mythology, Medusa was one of the three monstrous
sisters called the Gorgons; her face could turn those who looked at it into
stone. [Back to Text]
21Doric art: An older
form of Greek art and architecture which arose in the seventh century BC. [Back to Text]
22. . . cithara: a traditional stringed instrument. [Back to Text]
23Prometheus, a
Titan, brought fire down from heaven to human beings. Zeus punished him by
chaining him to a mountain and sending a vulture to feed on his liver during
the day. Oedipus’ fatal destiny had him unknowingly kill his father
and marry his mother. When he learned the truth, he tore out his own
eyes. The House of Atreus suffered from a savage curse
which pitted Atreus, father of Agamemnon, against his brother Thyestes.
Thyestes’ son, Aegisthus, seduced Agamemnon’s
wife, Clytaemnestra, and together they murdered Agamemnon.
Orestes, Agamemnon’s only son, avenged his father by killing Aegisthus and his own mother, Clytaemnestra.
The Etruscans were the dominant group in central Italy before the
rise of the Roman Republic. [Back to Text]
24The shade of the dead
Achilles makes this claim to Odysseus in Book XI of the Odyssey. [Back to Text]
25Schiller: Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), German
poet, dramatist, and philosopher. Rousseau: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712-1778), European (Swiss/French) philosopher, novelist, and political
theorist. His book Emile, published in 1762, presents his extremely
influential philosophy and program of education. [Back to Text]
26Raphael: Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520) a major artist of the
Renaissance. [Back to Text]
27Titans: In
Greek mythology these were the divine figures before the Olympians. Zeus
overthrew and imprisoned them. The barbarian world, for the Greeks,
included those people who did not speak Greek, whose language sounded like
gibberish to them (“bar . . . bar . . . bar”). [Back to Text]
28The sphinx was
a monster who terrorized the city of Thebes.
Oedipus solved the riddle posed by the Sphinx and was made king of Thebes. The Delphic god is
Apollo, who had his major shrine at Delphi. [Back to Text]
29Dorian art was associated
with Sparta, a city state preoccupied with military training, warfare, and an
inflexible political system. [Back to Text]
30Antigone, a
daughter of Oedipus, who killed herself rather than obey the state, is the
famous tragic heroine of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone.Cassandra,
daughter of Priam, king of Troy, was a
prophetess. She was given to Agamemnon as a war prize and murdered along with
him by Aegisthus and Clytaem-nestra
when the Greek armies returned home after the Trojan War [Back to Text]
31Homer: the
name given by the Greeks to the author of the Iliad and Odyssey (composed in
the eighth century BC); Archilochus: (680
BC to c. 645 BC), Greek poet from the island of Paros. [Back to Text]
32Terpander: Greek
poet in the first half of seventh century BC. The Boy’s Magic Horn is
a collection of folk songs. [Back to Text]
33Pindar: (c. 522
BC to 443 BC), Greek lyric poet. [Back to Text]
34A. W.
Schlegel: August Wilhelm von Schlegel: German poet and critic, a major
figure in German Romanticism. His On Dramatic
Art and Literature was published
in 1808. [Back to
Text]
35Schiller’s preface, Concerning
the Use of the Choir in Tragedy, was published in 1803. [Back to Text]
36In the Greek theatre
the stage area (sometimes called here the acting area) was an
elevated platform stage where the principal actors played their roles. The
orchestra, the flat semi-circular area extending in front of the stage area,
was the territory of the Chorus. [Back to Text]
37. . . the Bacchae: the
enraptured followers of the god Dionysus. [Back to Text]
38. . . dithyrambic chorus: The
dithyramb was an choral hymn of praise to Dionysus, characterized by a much
more ecstatic style than other hymns to the gods, especially to Apollo. [Back to Text]
39. . . Admetus .
. . Alcestis: In Greek mythology, when Admetus,
king of Thessaly, was dying from illness, Apollo spared him if he could find
someone to die in his place. His wife Alcestis volunteered, and Admetus was spared. Hercules later saved Alcestis from
death, and she was reunited with her husband. [Back to Text]
40The quotation comes from
Goethe’s Faust, Part 1. [Back to Text]
41Sophocles wrote two
surviving plays about the tragedy of Oedipus, king of Thebes: Oedipus
the King and Oedipus at Colonus.
The first tells the story of how Oedipus, the wisest man in Thebes, suffers
horribly from his own investigations into the murder of his predecessor. The
second depicts the reception, years later, of the very old and suffering Oedipus,
now near death, by the Athenians. [Back to Text]
42The quotation comes from
Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 316. [Back to Text]
43Memnon’s Column: an
immense structure in Thebes (in Egypt) beside the temple of Amenhotep III (1400 BC) which gave out sounds when
warmed by the sun. [Back to Text]
44In Goethe’s poem,
Prometheus addresses these words to Zeus, the chief Olympian god. Prometheus, a
Titan, was punished savagely by Zeus for stealing fire from heaven and giving
it to human beings. Prometheus also knew a secret prophecy that the minor
goddess Thetis, whom Zeus wanted to have sex with, would have a son more
powerful than his father. Aeschylus (525-456 BC), an Athenian tragedian,
presents a version of the story in his play Prometheus Bound, part
of a trilogy in which two plays have not survived. Goethe: Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), German’s greatest writer, author of a poem
called Prometheus, in which the mythic Prometheus hurls his defiance
at Zeus. [Back to Text]
45Palladium: The
Palladium is the divine image or statue which acted as the protector of the
state. In a famous incident in the Trojan War, Odysseus and Diomedes stole the Palladium from Troy. [Back to Text]
46Atlas: in
Greek mythology one of the primordial Titans, brother of Prometheus, condemned
by Zeus to hold up the sky so that it would remain separated from earth. [Back to Text]
47A quotation from
Goethe’s Faust. [Back to Text]
48Euripides:
(480-406 BC), a major Athenian tragic dramatist, the last of the celebrated
trio of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Dionysus is a principal character
in Euripides’ last play, The Bacchae. [Back to Text]
49The claim Nietzsche refers
to is made by Aristotle in his Poetics. [Back to Text]
50Plato:
(428-348 BC), the most important philosopher in classical Greece, distinguished
between a real word of ideal forms and the phenomenal world of sense
experience, with the latter being an inferior imitation of the former. [Back to Text]
51According to some Greek
myths Zeus and the goddess Demeter were the parents of Zagreus,
a child who was torn to pieces by the Titans but who was later born again,
either reassembled by Demeter or born to the mortal Semele.
Zagreus was identified with the god Dionysus, child
of Zeus and Semele. [Back to Text]
52When Zeus overcame the
Titans, who were immortal, he imprisoned them in Tartarus, a region deep
within the earth. [Back to Text]
53Lucians: Lucian
of Samosata (125 AD-180 AD), a popular
satirist in Roman Syria who wrote in Greek and, among other things, made fun of
traditional stories. [Back to Text]
54Tiberius:
Tiberius Caesar August (42 BC to 37 AD), second Roman emperor, after
Augustus. Pan: in Greek mythology, a god of the wilderness, hunting,
and shepherds. The quotation comes from Plutarch, a Greek historian
(46 AD to 120 AD). [Back to Text]
55Philemon: (c. 362
BC to c. 262 BC), very successful Athenian playwright; Menander: (c.
342 to 291 BC), Greek dramatist, famous for his works of New Comedy. [Back to Text]
56Graeculus: “little
Greek,” a pejorative name for a Greek; Aristophanes (456 BC to
386 BC), the greatest dramatist of Old Comedy; his play Frogs features a
long satiric verbal duel between Euripides and Aeschylus in Hades, an argument
about which of them is the better poet and what the features of the best
dramatic poetry must be. [Back to Text]
57Pythagoras: a Greek
philosopher in the sixth century BC; Heraclitus: ( 535 BC to 475 BC), Ionian philosopher. [Back to Text]
58Lessing: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 to 1781), German
dramatist, writer, and art critic. [Back to Text]
59Cadmus
and Teiresias: Cadmus, founder of Thebes, and Teiresias, the blind
prophet, are two old men in Euripides’ Bacchae. They are mocked in
the play for their desire to observe the Dionysian rites. At the end of the
play, Cadmus is transformed into a dragon. [Back to Text]
60deus ex machina (lit. “god out of a machine), a term
describing the resolution of a complex action by an extremely implausible event
(e.g., by having a god come down from on high to sort out all the problems on
the spot and to indicate what will happen in future to the main characters). [Back to Text]
61Anaxagoras: (c. 500
BC to 428 BC), an Ionian materialistic philosopher. [Back to Text]
62Orpheus: in
Greek mythology Orpheus was the pre-eminent poet and musician, who perfected
the lyre. He was said to have the power to charm nature with his music. Socrates was
charged by the Athenians with impiety, put on trial, and sentenced to death. He
died by drinking hemlock, the official method of execution. [Back to Text]
63Battle of
Marathon: (490 BC) one of the highest points of Greek (and especially
Athenian) history, when a small force of Greeks, led by the Athenians, defeated
the Persian expeditionary force at Marathon, near Athens. According to
tradition, Aeschylus fought at Marathon and Sophocles, as a young
lad, danced in the victory celebrations. [Back to Text]
64The Sophists were
professional teachers of rhetoric, who had the reputation of using clever arguments
to criticize traditional truths and to help their clients and pupils succeed in
legal disputes with sophisticated new reasoning, which many people regarded as
specious. Aristophanes portrays Socrates as the leader of a school of sophistic
reasoning in his play Clouds. Alcibiades: (450 BC to
404 BC) was an erratic and charismatic Athenian politician and military officer,
who repeatedly changed his allegiance during the Peloponnesian War). [Back to Text]
65The quotation comes from
Goethe’s Faust. [Back to Text]
66Cyclops: In
Greek mythology a cyclops was a huge,
one-eyed monster living in the wilderness. [Back to Text]
67Gellert:
Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715-1769),
German poet and professor of philosophy, famous for his moralistic
fables. Aesop: a sixth century BC Greek writer, by tradition a
slave, who is known only for the moralistic tales that bear his name. [Back to Text]
68In Plato’s theory of
knowledge, reality is ideal and can be apprehended only through the intellect,
not through the senses. The sensible world around us contains imitations of that
ideal reality (empirical objects copy or participate in the Idea of the object). [Back to Text]
69The Cynic
writers: The Cynics, an important school of philosophy in the fifth
century BC, encouraged a moral life free of material wealth. [Back to Text]
70Mephistopheles
. . . Lamia: In Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles is a representation
of the Devil. Lamia is an alternative name for Lilith, Adam’s first wife.
In Faust she is portrayed as a beautiful seductive woman. [Back to Text]
71Palestrina:
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
(1525 to 1594), Italian musician, famous for his polyphonic vocal harmonies. [Back to Text]
72In Greek mythology Orpheus
and Amphion were extraordinarily gifted musicians. [Back to Text]
73In the first part of
Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Roman poet Virgil is the narrator’s
guide through the circles of Hell but has to leave him as the narrator moves up
into Purgatory and Paradise. [Back to Text]
74Hercules
. . . Omphale: In Greek mythology, the
great hero Hercules had to serve for three years as a slave to Omphale, queen of Lydia, in retribution for murder. [Back to Text]
75Otto Jahn: (1813 to 1869), German scholar of archaeology
and philology and writer on music. [Back to Text]
76Heraclitus: ( c. 535 to 475 BC), pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from
Asia Minor. [Back
to Text]
77Winckelmann: Johann
Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), German art historian and archaeologist, an
important figure in the study of the classical Greeks. [Back to Text]
78Dürer:
Albrecht Dürer (1471 to 1528), German
painter, particularly famous for his prints. [Back to Text]
79Persian
Wars: Persian forces invaded Greece twice, in 490 and in 480 BC. The
first expedition ended with the Battle of Marathon and the second with the naval
battle of Salamis and the land battle of Plataea. These victories were high
points of classical Hellenic experience, particularly for the spirit of courage
and cooperation they displayed in the face of what looked like insuperable
odds. [Back to Text]
80Gervinus: Georg
Gottfried Gervinus (1805 to 1871), German
literary and political historian. [Back to Text]
81Tristan
and Isolde: an opera by Richard Wagner, first performed in 1865. [Back to Text]
82These lines come from
Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde,
Act III. [Back to Text]
83Schopenhauer’s famous
parable of the porcupines illustrates the dilemma people face in their
relationships with others: if, in the attempt to stay warm, they get too close
they will be hurt (i.e., by the quills on other porcupines), but if they remain
too far apart they will suffer from loneliness and cold. Hence, they need to
find the appropriate distance where they can obtain sufficient warmth and yet
avoid being hurt. [Back to Text]
84Lohengrin: an
opera by Richard Wagner, first produced in 1848. [Back to Text]
85Wotan and his daughter, Brunnhilde are characters in Richard Wagner’s opera
cycle The Ring of the Nibelungen.
The crafty dwarf, also a character in the work, is Alberich who
guards the Rhinegold treasure. [Back to Text]
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