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| The Birth of Tragedy (07) |
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,” as well as 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 only be understood 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.*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!21Moving 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 tragic mystery 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.* 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 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 [principle of individuation] 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: 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 for ever. 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 between the strongest and inherently most disastrous characteristics of a people.Tragedy draws the highest ecstatic music 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, full of 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 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 complex idea, something immediately understandable to few people, at this very 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 their 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 able to touch its innermost shrine. Some of these who take this road, like Gervinus, do not even succeed in reaching the lobby.* 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?*
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 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 of 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 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 working out 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 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 marvellous Apollonian deception it seems to us as if the empire of music 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, its 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 among our aestheticians it’s precisely 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.*In this way we recall the experiences of the truly aesthetic listener, the tragic artist himself, as he, like a voluptuous divinity of individuatio [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’s equally clear this reveals that all these people, together with their interpreting aetheticians, have experienced nothing of tragedy as a supreme art. That pathological purgation, the catharsis of Aristotle, which the philologues are uncertain whether to count a medical or a moral phenomenon, brings to mind a remarkable feeling of Goethe’s. “Without a living 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 glorious 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 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 necessarily led to an alienation from true artistic purposes and directly to a culture with a tendency towards 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 superceded. 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 in a vain, scattered, selfish, and, beyond this, 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 think so little of it. But can’t 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 that 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.* That was the moment they had a presentiment of what an aesthetic listener is. 23Anyone 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. However, 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’s now place abstract people, those who are not led by myths, abstract education, abstract customs, abstract law, the abstract state. Let’s remember the disorderly roaming of the artistic imagination which is not restrained by any secret myth. Let’s imagine a culture which has no fixed and sacred primordial seat but which is condemned to exhaust all possibilities and to subsist on a meagre 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’s 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 dreamers, 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
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Posted by symbolic on 2008-06-18 05:45:35 | Rating: | Views: 128
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