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| The Birth of Tragedy (05) |
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 did Plato as well, to show 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 said, 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.* 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. 13That Socrates had a close relationship to Euripides’ attitude did not escape their contemporaries in ancient times, and the clearest expression for 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.*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.* 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 oracular 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 grips us about Socrates whenever we run into him 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 demi-god 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!”*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-mystic 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 naivete 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 stay behind, 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.14Let’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.* 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 appeared 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.*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 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.*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 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.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, a translation of the Dionysian 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 frequently 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 of 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 look like now with respect to the chorus and the whole musical-Dionysian basis 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 origin 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 dared to trust the Chorus to carry the major share of the action, but limited 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 with breakneck speed one after the other. 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 back 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, often one and the same dream apparition came to him, always with the same words, “Socrates, practise 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’s 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?15In the sense of this last mysterious question we must how 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 an 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, even 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 these 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 the 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 such 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 ethics 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 those people who want 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 tunnelling 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. That statement unmasks the fundamental secret of science, 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 after another, like wave after wave, succeed each other, how a never imagined universal greed for knowledge through 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 the form of 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 there is a universal medicine 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 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 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 to produce an endless supply of 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, in 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!16By 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 [principle of individuation], 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 great thinker, 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 as compared to 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 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 between music and 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 [before experience], although they are not abstract but vivid and thoroughly fixed. All possible efforts, excitements, and expressions 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 is really well expressed in the language of the scholastics, where they said: 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, that 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 [principle of individuation], 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
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Posted by symbolic on 2008-06-18 05:43:15 | Rating: | Views: 122
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