The Birth
of Tragedy
by
Friedrich
Nietzsche
1871
This translation by Ian
Johnston of Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC, has certain copyright
restrictions. For information please use the following link: Copyright.
For comments or question please contact Ian Johnston. Last revised June
2003.
The translator has added
occasional editorial inserts to help clarify some foreign terms. And
Nietzsche's long paragraphs have been broken into shorter
units.
For questions, suggestions,
corrections, and so on please contact Ian Johnston
For the German text of Die Geburt der Tragödie, click here.
Friedrich
Nietzsche
The Birth of
Tragedy
An
Attempt at Self-Criticism
[Note 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]
Whatever might have been be 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. Testimony to that effect is the time 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 Worth 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 concerning the Greeks, the kernel of that odd and difficult book to
which this later preface (or postscript) should be dedicated. 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'd brought back home with him from the
field, finished composing the Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of
Music.
—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—the Greeks? How can this be? Did they really need tragedy? Even more to the
point, did they really need art? And Greek art, what is that, and how did it
come about?
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, and disaster, of the exhausted and enfeebled
instinct, as it was among the Indians, as it is now, to all appearances, among
us “modern” peoples and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of the strong? An
intellectual inclination for what in existence is hard, dreadful, angry, and
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, like an enemy—a worthy enemy—against which it can test its power, from
which it will 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? And what about what was born out of the
Dionysian—the tragedy? By contrast, what are we to make of what killed
tragedy—Socratic morality, dialectic, the satisfaction and serenity of the
theoretical man? Could not this very Socratic way be a sign of collapse,
exhaustion, sickness, and the dissolution of the anarchic instinct? 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?
And even scientific enquiry itself, our science—indeed, what does all scientific
enquiry 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? Oh,
Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? Oh 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 scholarship itself, scholarly research for the first time grasped
as problematic, as dubious. But that book, in which my youthful courage and
suspicion then spoke, what an impossible book had to grow out of a task so
contrary to the spirit of youth!
Created out of merely premature and really
immature personal experiences, which lay close to the threshold of something
communicable, and built on the basis of art (for the problem of scientific
research cannot be understood on the basis of scientific enquiry)—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 as well, even where it seemed to bow down with special reverence
to an authority—in short, a first work also in the bad sense of the word,
afflicted, in spite of the antiquity of the problem, 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.” For that reason the book should at this point be handled
with some consideration and discretion. However, I will not totally hide how
unpleasant the book seems to me now, how strangely after sixteen years it stands
there in front of me, an older man, a hundred times more discriminating, but
with eyes which have not grown colder in the slightest. The issue which that
bold book dared to approach for the first time has itself become no more remote:
to look at scientific enquiry 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, painful, with fantastic and
confused imagery, 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 in music, those
who are bound together from the start in secret and esoteric aesthetic
experiences, a secret sign recognized among artistic blood relations, an
arrogant and rhapsodic book, which right from the start hermetically sealed
itself off from the profane vulgarity of the “intelligentsia” even more than
from the “people,” but a book which, as its effect proved and continues to
prove, must also understand enough of this issue to search out its fellow
rhapsodists and tempt them to new secret paths and dancing
grounds.
At any rate here a strange voice spoke (curious
people understood that, as did those who found it distasteful), 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 the followers 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 a question mark. Here spoke (so
people told themselves suspiciously) something like a mystic and an almost
maenad-like soul, which stammered with difficulty and arbitrarily, as if talking
a foreign language, almost uncertain whether it wanted to communicate something
or remain silent. 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 remain, as before, entirely unknown and unknowable as long as we have
no answer to the question, “What is the Dionysian?”
4
Indeed, what is the Dionysian? This book offers an
answer to that question: a “knowledgeable person” speaks there, the initiate and
disciple of his own 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 strong desire
for beauty, feasts, festivities, and new cults arose out of some lack,
deprivation, melancholy, or pain. If we assume that this desire for the
beautiful and the good might be quite true—and Pericles, or, rather, Thucydides,
in the great Funeral Oration gives us to understand that it is—where must that
contradictory desire stem from, which appears earlier than the desire for
beauty, namely, the desire for the ugly or the good strong willing of the
ancient Hellenes for pessimism, for tragic myth, for pictures of everything
fearful, angry, enigmatic, destructive, and fateful as the basis of existence?
Where must tragedy come from? Perhaps out of desire, out of power, out of
overflowing health, out of overwhelming fullness of life?
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, collapse, cultural decadence? Is there perhaps (a question for
doctors who treat madness) a neurosis 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 Greeks
have to imagine the Dionysian enthusiast and original man as a satyr? And what
about the origin of the tragic chorus?
In those centuries when the Greek body flourished
and the Greek soul bubbled over with life, perhaps there were endemic raptures,
visions, and hallucinations which entire communities, entire cultural bodies,
shared. What if it were the case that the Greeks, right in the midst of their
rich youth, had the desire for tragedy and were pessimists? What if it was
clearly lunacy, to use a saying from Plato, which brought the greatest blessings
throughout Hellas?
And, on the other hand, what if, to turn the issue
around, it was clearly during the time of their dissolution and weakness that
the Greeks became constantly more optimistic, more superficial, more
hypocritical, with a 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 judgments of democratic taste, could the victory of
optimism, the developing hegemony of reasonableness, practical and theoretical
utilitarianism, as well as democracy itself (which occurs in the same period)
perhaps be a symptom of failing power, approaching old age, physiological
exhaustion, all these factors rather than pessimism? Was Epicurus an optimist
for the very reason that 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, and
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 aesthetic 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 and destruction, in
good things and bad, dispassionately desires to become aware of his own
pleasures and power, a God who, as he creates worlds, rids himself of the strain
of fullness and superfluity, from the suffering of pressing internal
contradictions. The world is at every moment the attained manifestation of God,
as the eternally changing, eternally new vision of the person who suffers most,
who is the most rent with contradictions, the one with the richest sense of
protest, who knows how to save himself only in illusion.
People may call this entire artistic metaphysic
arbitrary, pointless, and fantastic, but the essential point about it is that it
already betrays a spirit which will at some point establish itself on that
dangerous ground and make a stand against the moralistic interpretation and
moral meaningfulness of existence. Here is announced, perhaps for the first
time, a pessimism “beyond good and evil.” Here comes that “perversity in belief”
in word and formula against which Schopenhauer never grew tired of hurling his
angriest curses and thunderstones in advance, a philosophy which dared to place
morality itself in the world of phenomena and so to subsume it, not under the
“visions” (in the sense of some idealistic end point) but under “illusions,” as
an appearance, delusion, fallacy, interpretation, something made up, a work of
art.
Perhaps we can best gauge the depth of this
tendency hostile to morality from the careful and hostile silence with which
Christianity is treated in the entire book, Christianity as the most excessive
and thorough figuring out of a moralistic theme which humanity has ever had
available to listen to. To tell the truth, there is nothing which stands more in
opposition to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the
world, as it was set out in this book, than Christian teaching, which is and
will remain merely moralistic and which, with its absolute moral standards (for
example, with its truthfulness of God), relegates 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 consistent, I always
perceived also a hostility 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 disgust and weariness with life, which only dressed itself up, 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 value only moral worth, has always seemed
to me the most dangerous and most eerie 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 wicked, because life is something essentially amoral. Hence,
pressed down under this weight of contempt and eternal No's, life must finally
be experienced as something not worth desiring, as something worthless. And what
about morality itself? Isn't morality a “desire for the denial of life,” a
secret instinct for destruction, a principle of decay, diminution, and slander,
a beginning of the end, and thus, the greatest of all
dangers?
And so, my instinct at that time turned itself
against morality in this questionable book, as an instinctual affirmation of
life, and a fundamentally different doctrine, a totally opposite way of
evaluating life, was invented, 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 for 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 stir up with this book? . . . How much I now regret the fact that at
the time I didn't have the courage (or the presumptuousness?) to consider
allowing myself a personal language appropriate to such an odd point of view and
such a daring exploit—that I sought laboriously to express strange and 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!
What then did Schopenhauer think about tragedy? He
says, “What gives all tragedies their characteristic drive for elevation is the
working out of the recognition that the world and life cannot provide any just
satisfactions, and thus our devotion to it is not worthwhile; the tragic spirit
lives on in that insight, and it leads from there to resignation” (The World
as Will and Idea, II,495). Oh, how differently Dionysus speaks to me!
Oh, how far from me then was just this entire doctrine of
resignation!—
But there is something much worse about my book,
something which I regret even more than to have obscured and spoiled my
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! I regret that, on the basis of the most recent German music, I
began to tell stories of the “German character,” just as if that character might
be about to discover itself, to find itself again. And all that at a time when
the German spirit (which not so long before had the desire to rule Europe and
the power to assume leadership of Europe) was, as its last will and testament,
abdicating and, beneath the ostentatious pretext of founding an empire, making
the transition to a negotiated moderation, to democracy and “modern
ideas”!
As a matter of fact, in the intervening years I
have learned to think of that “German character” without any hope and without
mercy—similarly with German music, which is Romantic through and through and the
most un-Greek of all possible art forms, and besides that, the worst sort of
narcotic, doubly dangerous among a people who love drink and honour 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 the defective practical applications to present times with
which I then ruined my first book, the great Dionysian question mark remains
still standing, as it is set out there (also in relation to music): How should a
music be created which is no longer Romantic in origin (like the German) but
Dionysian?
7
But, my dear sir, what in the earth 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 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 something not too
distant from practical nihilism and which seems to say “I'd rather that
nothingness were the truth than that you were right, than that your truth was
justified!”
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 killer, who may sound like
an awkward pied piper to those with young ears and hearts. What? Is your book
not a true and justified 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 gods. . . . What? Isn't your book of pessimism 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
monstrous; 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, so that they live with resolution, fully and
completely. Would it not be necessary for the tragic man of this culture, having
trained himself for what is serious and frightening, to desire a new art, an art
of metaphysical consolation, tragedy as his own personal Helen of Troy, and to
have to cry out with Faust:
And should I not, through my power to
yearn,
Drag into life that most extraordinary form?
“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—that you will end up—being consoled, as is written, in spite
of all the self-training for what is serious and frightening, “metaphysically
consoled,” as Romantics tend to finish up, as Christians. No! You should for the
time being 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 ship all that
metaphysical consolation to the devil—and then away with metaphysics! Or, to
speak the language of that Dionysian fiend called
Zarathustra:
“Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher!
And for my sake don't forget your legs! 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 on myself. I speak out my holy
laughter to myself. 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 placed the crown on myself!”
“This crown of the laughing man, this crown of
rose wreaths: my brothers I throw this crown to you! Laughter I declare sacred:
you higher men, for my sake learn to laugh!”
August 1886
Preface
to Richard Wagner
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 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 only write down 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 marvelous commemorative
volume on Beethoven appeared, that is, during the shock and grandeur of the war
which had just broken out . Nevertheless, people might think that this
collection of ideas has an aesthetic voluptuousness opposed to patriotic
excitement, a cheerful game different from brave seriousness. Such people
would be quite wrong. By actually reading the work, they should rather 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 they
are in a position to see art as nothing more than a merry diversion, as an
easily dispensable bell-ringing summoning us to the “Seriousness of Existence,”
as if no one knew what such as opposing stance as this has to do with such
“Seriousness of Existence.”
For these serious 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 inspiring pioneer on this path, have dedicated this
book.
Basel, December 1871
1
We will have achieved much for the study of
aesthetics when we come, not merely to a logical understanding, but also to the
immediately certain 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 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 link our recognition that in the Greek world there exists a huge contrast, in
origins and purposes, between visual (plastic) arts, the Apollonian, and the
non-visual art of music, the Dionysian. Both 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 for themselves the contest of opposites which the common word
“Art” only seems to bridge, until they finally, through a marvelous metaphysical
act, seem to pair up with each other and, as this pair, produce Attic tragedy,
just as much a Dionysian as an Apollonian work of art.
In order to get closer to these two instinctual
drives, let us think of them next as the separate artistic worlds of dreams 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 ideas of Lucretius, the marvelous
divine shapes first appeared to the mind of man in a dream. It was in a dream
that the great artist saw the delightful anatomy of superhuman existence, and
the Hellenic poet, questioned about the secrets of poetic creativity, would have
recalled his dreams and given an explanation exactly similar to the one Hans
Sachs provides in Die Meistersinger.
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 condition of all plastic
art, indeed, as we shall see, an important half of poetry. We enjoy the form
with an immediate understanding, all shapes speak to us, nothing is indifferent
and unnecessary.
For all the very intense life of these dream
realities, we nevertheless have the thoroughly disagreeable sense of their
illusory quality. At least that is my experience. For their frequency, even
normality, I can point to many witnesses and the utterances of poets. Even the
philosophical man has the presentiment that this reality in which we live and
have our being is an illusion, that under it lies hidden a second quite
different reality. 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. This is not merely a case of agreeable and
friendly images which he experiences 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, yet not without that fleeting
sensation 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 causal connection 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, as a delightful
necessity.
The Greeks expressed this joyful necessity of the
dream experience in their god Apollo, who, as 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 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
as to 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
calm wisdom 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 one may verify (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 [the principle of
individuality]” (World as Will and Idea, Vol. I, p. 416). Yes, we
could say of Apollo that the imperturbable trust in that principle and the calm
sitting still of the man conscious of it attained its loftiest expression in
him, and we may even designate Apollo himself as the marvelous 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 monstrous horror which seizes a man when he suddenly doubts his ways of
comprehending illusion, when the sense of a foundation, in any one of its forms,
appears to suffer a breakdown. If we add to this horror the ecstatic rapture,
which rises up out of the same collapse of the principium individuationis
from the innermost depths of human beings, yes, 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, or through the powerful coming on of
spring, which drives joyfully through all of nature, that Dionysian excitement
arises. As its power increases, the subjective fades into complete forgetfulness
of self. In the German Middle Ages under the same power of Dionysus constantly
growing hordes waltzed from place to place, singing and dancing. In that St.
John's and St. Vitus's dancing we recognize the Bacchic chorus of the Greeks
once again, and its precursors in Asia Minor, right back to Babylon and the
orgiastic Sacaea [a riotous Babylonian festival].
There are men who, from a lack of experience or
out of apathy, turn mockingly away from such phenomena as from a “sickness of
the people,” with a sense of their own health and filled with pity. 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, now
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
is 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 if
the veil of Maja has been ripped apart, with only scraps fluttering around
before the mysterious original unity. Singing and dancing, man expresses himself
as a member of a higher unity. 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 speak and the earth gives milk and honey, so
now something supernatural echoes out of him. He feels himself a god. He now
moves in a lofty ecstasy, 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, the rhapsodic satisfaction of the primordial unity, reveals itself here
in the intoxicated performance. The finest clay, the most expensive
marble—man—is here worked and chiseled, and the cry of the Eleusianian 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?”
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 drive is 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 restore him through a mystic feeling of
collective unity. In comparison to these unmediated artistic states of nature,
every artist is an “Imitator,” and, in fact, an artist either of Apollonian
dream or Dionysian intoxication or, finally, as in Greek tragedy, for example,
simultaneously an artist of intoxication and dreams. As the last, it is possible
for us to imagine how he sinks down in the Dionysian drunkenness and mystical
obliteration of the self, alone and apart from the rapturous throng, 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.
In accordance with these general assumptions and
comparisons, let us now approach the Greeks, in order to recognize to what
degree and to what heights the natural artistic drives had developed in them and
how we are in a position to understand more deeply and 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 fair 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 justify us, if such a comparison were
possible, to describe the dreaming Greek man as a 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 have to expose the immense gap which separates the
Dionysian Greeks from the Dionysian barbarians. In all quarters of the old 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 Greeks
in much the same way as the bearded satyr whose name and characteristics 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
traditional laws. The wildest bestiality of nature was here unleashed, creating
an abominable mixture of lust and cruelty, which has always seemed to me the
real witches' potion.
From the feverish excitement of these festivals,
knowledge of which reached the Greeks from all directions, by land and sea, they
were apparently for a long time completely secure and protected through the
figure of Apollo, drawn up in all his pride. Apollo could counter by holding up
the head of Medusa in the face of the unequalled power of this crude and
grotesque Dionysian force. Doric art has immortalized this majestic bearing of
Apollo as he stands in opposition. This opposition became more dubious and even
impossible as similar impulses gradually broke out from the deepest roots of
Hellenic culture itself. Now the effect of the Delphic god, in a timely process
of reconciliation, limited itself to taking the destructive weapon out of the
hand of his powerful opponent.
This reconciliation is the most important moment
in the history of Greek culture. Wherever we look the revolutionary effects of
this experience manifest themselves. It was the reconciliation of two opponents,
who from now on observed their differences with a sharp demarcation of the
border line between them and with occasional gifts send to honour each other.
Basically the gap was not bridged over. However, if we see how, under the
pressure of this 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 the
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 individualizing
principle] becomes an artistic phenomenon. Here that dreadful witches'
potion of lust and cruelty was without power. The strange mixture and ambiguity
in the emotions of the Dionysian celebrant remind him, as healing potions remind
him of deadly poison, of that sense that pain awakens joy, 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 language of song and poetry of such a doubly
defined celebrant was for the Homeric Greek world something new and unheard of.
Dionysian music especially awoke in that world 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
developed for presenting Apollonian states of mind. The music of Apollo was
Doric architecture expressed in sound, but only in intimate tones,
characteristic of the cithara [a traditional stringed instrument}. The
un-Apollonian character of Dionysian music keeps such an element of gentle
caution at a distance, and with that turns music generally into emotionally
disturbing tonal power, a 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 before
forces itself into expression—the destruction of the veil of Maja, the sense of
oneness as the presiding genius of form, of nature itself. Now the essence of
nature must express itself symbolically; a new world of symbols is necessary,
the entire symbolism of the body, not just the symbolism of mouth, face, and
words, but the full gestures of the dance—all the limbs moving to the rhythm.
And then the other symbolic powers grow, those of music, rhythm, dynamics, and
harmony—all with sudden spontaneity.
To grasp this total unleashing of all symbolic
powers, man must already have attained that high level of freedom from the self
which seeks to express itself symbolically in those forces. Because of this, the
dithyrambic servant of Dionysus will understand only 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 may not be
really foreign to him, that even his Apollonian consciousness was covering the
Dionysian world in front of him, like a veil.
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 become aware for the first
time of the marvelous 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 the others
and without any claim to the pre-eminent position, we should not on that account
let ourselves be deceived. The same instinct which made Apollo perceptible to
the senses gave birth to the entire Olympian world in general. In this sense, we
must value Apollo as the father of them all. What was the immense need out of
which such an illuminating group of Olympic beings arose?
Anyone who steps up to these Olympians with
another religion in his heart and seeks from them ethical loftiness, even
sanctity or spiritual longing for the non-physical, for loving gazes filled with
pity, must soon enough despondently turn his back on them in disappointment. For
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 summon back this onlooker who has
already turned around to go away. “Don't leave them. First listen to what Greek
folk wisdom expresses about this very life which spreads out before you here
with such inexplicable serenity. There is an old saying to the effect 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, 'Suffering creature, born
for a day, child of accident and toil, why are you forcing me to say what is the
most unpleasant thing for you 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 pain.
Now, as it were, the Olympic magic mountain
reveals itself to us and shows us its roots. The Greek knew and felt the terror
and horror of existence. In order to live at all, he must have placed in front
of him the gleaming Olympians, born in his dreams. That immense distrust of the
titanic forces of nature, that Moira [Fate] enthroned mercilessly above
all knowledge, that vulture that devoured Prometheus, friend of man, that fatal
lot drawn by wise Oedipus, that family curse on the House of Atreus, that
Orestes compelled 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, all that was overcome time after time by the
Greeks (or at least hidden and removed from view) through the artistic middle
world of the Olympians.
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 instinctive Apollonian drive
for beauty there developed by slow degrees 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 endured their
existence, unless the same qualities manifested themselves in their gods, around
whom flowed a higher glory. The same instinctual drive which summons art into
life as the seductive replenishment for further living and the completion of
existence also gave rise to the Olympian world, by 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 consists in
the separation from that sunlight, above all in the fact that such separation is
close at hand., so that we could 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 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 heroes to long to live on,
even as a day labourer. In the Apollonian stage, the “Will” so spontaneously
demands to live on, the Homeric man fills himself with that feeling so much,
that even his lament becomes a song of praise.
At this point we must point out that this harmony,
this union of man with nature (something looked on enviously by more recent
ages), for which Schiller coined the artistic slogan “naïve,” 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 an artist and imagines it has found in Homer an artist like Emile raised in
the bosom of nature. Wherever we encounter the “naïve” in art, we have to
recognize the highest effect of Apollonian culture, something which always must
come into existence to overthrow the kingdom of the Titans, to kill monsters,
and through powerfully deluding images and joyful illusions to emerge victorious
over the horrific depths of what we observe in the world and the most sensitive
capacity for suffering. But how seldom does the naïve, 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 person, was related to
Apollonian popular culture as the single dream artist to his 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 the deception. With the Greeks it was a case of
the “Will” wishing to gaze upon itself through the transforming power of genius
and the world of art. In order to celebrate itself, its creatures had to sense
that they were worthy of being glorified—they must 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 and the wisdom of suffering which
is bound up with artistic talent, and as a memorial of its victory Homer, the
naïve artist, stands before us.
4
Using the analogy of a dream we can learn
something about this naïve 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,” and if we can infer, on the
one hand, a deep inner delight at the contemplation of dreams, and, on the
other, that he must have completely forgotten the pressing problems of his daily
life, in order to be capable of dreaming at all with such an inner contemplative
joy, then we may interpret all these phenomena, with the guidance of Apollo, the
interpreter of dreams, in something like the manner which follows
below.
To be sure, with respect to both halves of life,
the waking and the dreaming states, the first one strikes us as
disproportionately better, more important, more valuable, more worth living—the
only way to live. Nevertheless I can assert (something of a paradox to all
appearances) on the basis of the 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 forced to the metaphysical assumption that
the true basis of being , the ever suffering and entirely contradictory
primordial oneness, 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
continuing development in time, space, and causality, in other words, as an
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 each moment, then we must consider our dreams as
illusions of illusions, as well as an even higher fulfillment of the primordial
hunger for illusion. For the same reasons, the innermost core of nature takes an
indescribable joy in the naïve artist and naïve works of art, which is, in the
same way, only “an illusion of an illusion.”
Rafael, himself one of those immortal “naïve”
artists, in one of his allegorical paintings, has presented that issue of
transforming an illusion into an illusion, the fundamental process of the naïve
artist and Apollonian culture as well. In his Transfiguration the bottom
half shows us, in the possessed boy, the despairing porters, and 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, 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 very 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, the
reciprocal necessity for both of them. But Apollo confronts us once again as the
divine manifestation of the principii individuationis [the
individualizing principle], in which the eternally attained goal of the
primordial oneness, its redemption through illusion, comes into being. He shows
us, with his awe-inspiring gestures, how the entire world of torment is
necessary, so that through it the individual is pushed to create 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 the principle of
individualization, if it is thought of in general as commanding and
proscriptive, understands only one law, that of the individual, that is,
observing the limits of individualization, moderation in the Greek sense.
Apollo, as the ethical divinity, demands moderation from his followers and
self-knowledge, so that they can observe moderation.. And so alongside the
aesthetic necessity of beauty run the demands “Know thyself” and “Nothing in
excess.” Arrogance and excess are considered the essentially hostile daemons of
the non-Apollonian sphere, therefore characteristic of the pre-Apollonian
period, the age of the Titans, and of the world beyond the Apollonian, that is,
the barbarian world. 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.
To the Apollonian Greeks the effect aroused by the
Dionysian also seemed “Titanic” and “barbaric.” But they could not, with that
response, conceal that they themselves were, nonetheless, internally related and
similar to those deposed Titans and heroes. Indeed, they must have felt even
more that their entire existence, with all its beauty and moderation, rested on
some hidden underground of suffering and knowledge which was reawakened 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 tempting
magic, how in such celebrations the entire excess of nature sang out loudly in
joy, suffering, and knowledge, even in the most piercing scream. Let's imagine
what the psalm-chanting Apollonian artist, with his ghostly harp music could
offer 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 Olympian. Individualism, with all its limits and moderation, was
destroyed in the self-forgetfulness of the Dionysian condition and forgot its
Apollonian principles.
Excess revealed itself as the truth. The
contradictory ecstasy born from of pain spoke of itself right out of the heart
of nature. And so the Apollonian was canceled and destroyed, above all where 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.
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 constant sequence of births, one after
the other, mutually intensifying each other, how, out of the “first” ages, with
their battles of the Titans and their harsh popular philosophy, the Homeric
world developed under the rule of the Apollonian drive for beauty, how this
“naïve” magnificence is 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 ancient history of the Greeks,
in the struggle of these 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 the last attained period,
the one of Doric art, as the summit and intention of these artistic impulses.
Here, the lofty and highly much praised artistic achievement of Attic tragedy
and the dramatic dithyramb presents itself before our eyes, as the common goal
of both artistic drives, whose secret marriage partnership, after a long
antecedent struggle, celebrated itself with such a child, simultaneously
Antigone and Cassandra.
5
We are now approaching the essential goal of our
undertaking, which aims at a knowledge of the Dionysian-Apollonian genius and
its works of art, or at least an intuitive understanding of its mysterious
unity. Here now we raise the question of where that new seed first appears 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 as the
originators and torch-bearers of Greek poetry in paintings, cameos, and so on,
in full confidence that only these two should be considered equally the original
natures from whom a fire-storm flowed out over the entire later world of the
Greeks.
Homer, the ancient self-absorbed dreamer, the
archetype of the naïve 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 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, since we
recognize the subjective artist as a bad artist and demand in every 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 accepting the slightest artistic creation
as true, unless it has objectivity and a purely disinterested
contemplation.
Hence, our aesthetic must first solve the problem
of how it is possible for the “lyricist” to be an artist. For he, according to
the experience of all ages, always says “I” and sings out the entire chromatic
sequence of the sounds of his passions and desires. This Archilochus immediately
startles us, alongside Homer, through his cry of hate and scorn, through the
drunken eruptions of his desire. By doing this, isn't Archilochus (the first
artist called subjective) essentially a non-artist? But then where does that
veneration come from, which the Delphic oracle, the centre of “objective” art,
showed to him, the poet, in very remarkable sayings.
Schiller has illuminated his own writing process
with a psychological observation, inexplicable to him, which nevertheless does
not appear questionable. 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, but
rather a musical mood: “With me, feeling at first lacks a defined and clear
object—that develops for the first time later on. A certain musical emotional
state comes first, and from this, with me, the poetic idea then
follows.”
Now, if we add the most important phenomenon of
the entire ancient lyric, the union, universally acknowledged as natural,
between the lyricist and the musician, even 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,
account for the lyric poet in the following manner. He has, first of all, as a
Dionysian artist, become entirely one with the primordial oneness of his painful
contradictory nature and produces the reflection of this primordial oneness as
music, if music can with justice be called a re-working of the world, its second
coat. 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 concepts, of the original pain in music,
together with its redemption in illusion, gives rise now to a second reflection
as the particular metaphor or illustration. The artist has already surrendered
his subjectivity in the Dionysian process. The image which now reveals 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, at the same time, 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 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 lacks any 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 mysteriously unified state of
renunciation of the self. These have a colour, causality, and speed entirely
different from that world of the plastic artist and 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. Even the image of the angry Achilles is for him
only a picture whose expressions 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 being fused together with the forms he
has created. By contrast, the images of the lyric poet are nothing but 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 its portrayal the lyrical genius sees right into the very basis of
things.
Now let's imagine how he 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 seems as if the lyrical genius
and the non-genius bound up with him were one and the same and as if he first
spoke that little word “I” about himself, then this illusion could 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 no
longer Archilochus any more but a world genius and who expresses his primordial
pain symbolically in Archilochus as a metaphor for man. That subjectively
willing and desiring man Archilochus can never ever be a poet. It is not at all
essential that the lyric poet see directly in front of him the phenomenon of the
man Archilochus as a reflection of eternal being. 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 observer of art, believed
that he had discovered a solution (something which I cannot go along with) when
in his profound metaphysics of music he found a way setting the difficulty
decisively to one side, as I believe I have done in his spirit and with due
honour to him. He describes the essential nature of song as
follows:
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). It is
always a mobile condition of the heart: emotional and passionate. However,
alongside this condition, the singer simultaneously, through a glimpse at the
surrounding nature, becomes aware of himself as a subject of the pure, will-less
knowledge, whose imperturbable, blessed tranquilly now enters to contrast the
pressure of his always dull, 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
state, pure understanding, as it were, comes to us, to save us from willing and
the pressures of willing. We follow along, but only moment by moment. The will,
the memory of our personal goals, constantly interrupts this calm contemplation
of ours, over and over again, but the next beautiful setting, in which pure
will-less knowledge presents itself to us, always, once again, releases us from
willing. Hence, in the song and the lyrical mood, willing (our personal interest
in our own purposes) and pure contemplation in the setting which presents 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, gives its 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, 295)
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
must 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, which
even Schopenhauer uses as a measurement of value to classify art, that
opposition of the subjective and the objective, 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. For we
need to be clear on this point, above everything else (to our humiliation or
ennoblement): the entire comedy of art does not present itself for us in order
to make us better or to educate us—even less so that we should be the true
creators of the art world. We should really look upon ourselves as beautiful
pictures and artistic projections of the true creator, and in that significance
as works of art we have our highest value, for only as an aesthetic phenomena
are existence and the world eternally justified, while, of course, our own
consciousness of this significance of ours is no 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 or
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, only in that
state in which (as in the weird picture of fairy tales) he can miraculously turn
his eyes and contemplate himself. Now he is simultaneously subject and object,
all at once 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 his 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 duality of nature is:
which, to use an analogy, leaves its trace behind in the folk song just as the
orgiastic movements of a people leave their traces in its music. Indeed, it must
also be historically demonstrable how that period rich in folk songs at the same
time was stirred in the strongest manner by Dionysian trends, something which we
have to recognize as the foundation and precondition of folk
songs.
But to begin with, we must view the folk song as
the musical mirror of the world, as the primordial melody, which seeks for a
parallel dream image of itself and expresses this in poetry. The melody is thus
primary and universal, for which reason it can undergo many objectifications, in
several texts. It is also far more important and more essential in the naïve
evaluations of the people. Melody gives birth to poetry from itself, over and
over again. The forms of the strophes in the folk song indicate that to us. I
have 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 Miraculous Horn] with this theory in
mind will find countless examples of how the continually fecund melody emits
fiery showers of images all around. These images, with their bright colours,
sudden alteration, and their wild momentum, reveal a power completely foreign to
the epic illusion and its calm forward progress. From the standpoint of epic
this uneven and irregular word of images in the lyric is easy to
condemn—something no doubt the solemn rhapsodists of the Apollonian celebrations
did in the age of Terpander.
Thus, in the poetry of the folk song we see the
language of poetry most strongly pressured to imitate music. Hence, with
Archilochus a new world of poetry begins, something which conflicts very
profoundly with the Homeric world. Here we have demonstrated the one possible
relationship between poetry and music, word and tone: word, image, and idea look
for metaphorical expression in music and experience the power of music. In this
sense we can distinguish two main streams in the history of the language of the
Greek people: language which imitates appearance and images and language which
imitates the world of music.
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. It will
become crystal clear to some that between Homer and Pindar the orgiastic flute
melodies of Olympus must have rung out, music which even in the time of
Aristotle, in the midst of an infinitely more sophisticated music, drove people
into raptures of drunken enthusiasm and with their natural effects no doubt
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 objectionable. Again and
again we experience how a Beethoven symphony makes it necessary for the
individual listener to talk in images, even if it's true that the collection of
different worlds of imagery created by a musical piece really looks
fantastically confused, even contradictory. The most proper style of our
aestheticians is to exercise their lame wits on such a collection and to
overlook the phenomenon which is really worth explaining. Even when the tone
poet has spoken in images about his composition, for example, when he describes
a symphony as a pastoral, one movement as “A Scene by the Brook,” and another as
“A Frolicking Meeting of Peasants,” these expressions are in any event only
metaphors, images born out of the music and not some objective condition
imitated by the music. These notions cannot teach us anything at all about the
Dionysian content of the music and have no exclusive value alongside other
pictures.
Now, we have only to transfer this process of
unloading music into pictures to a large, youthful, linguistically creative
population in order to sense how the strophic folk song arose and how the entire
linguistic capability was stimulated by a new principle, the imitation of music.
If we can thus 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, pure, contemplative, will-less state. Here we should differentiate as
sharply as possible the idea of being from the idea of appearance. For 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.
In order to express that appearance in images, the
lyric poet needs all the excitement of passion, from the whispers of affection
right 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 is resting in the still tranquility 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
condition of emotional dissatisfaction. His own willing, yearning, groaning, and
cheering are for him a metaphor 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 his 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
complete freedom, music does not use 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 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 overcome 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, the organ
and symbol of appearances, never ever converts 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 don't think I'm saying anything illogical when I claim that the
problem of this origin has not once been seriously formulated up to now, let
alone solved, no matter how frequently the scattered scraps of ancient tradition
have been put together in combinations with one another and then again ripped
apart.
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 in any way with the common styles 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 their kings' passionate
acts of violence and excess) may 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. Looking with hindsight
back on the classical form of the chorus known to us in Aeschylus and Sophocles
we might well consider it blasphemous to talk of a premonition of the
“constitutional popular representation” here. Others, however, have not been
deterred from this blasphemous assertion. The ancient political organizations
had no practical knowledge of a constitutional popular representation and 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. He recommended that we consider the
chorus to some extent as a sample embodiment of the crowd of onlookers, as the
“ideal spectator.” This view, combined with that 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 the glitter
survives only in the compact form of the expression, from the real 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 to derive some idealization
analogous to the tragic chorus. We silently deny this and then are 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. By contrast, 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 is 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 sufficiently capable, the more he was in
a position to take the work of art as art, that is, aesthetically. 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.
“Oh, what about these Greeks!” we sigh, “they are knocking over our aesthetics!”
But once we get used to that 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 we have if from this the idea of the spectator we derived,
as its essential form, the “spectator in himself” (the pure spectator). 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 to be touched 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—the chorus viewed as a living wall which tragedy draws
about itself in order to separate itself cleanly from the real world and to
protect its ideal space and its poetical freedom for itself. With this as his
main weapon Schiller fought against the common idea of naturalism, against the
common demand for illustionistic dramatic poetry. While in the theatre daytime
might be only artistic and stage architecture only symbolic, and the nature of
the metrical language might have an ideal quality, nevertheless, on the whole, a
misconception still ruled: it was not enough, Schiller claimed, that people
merely tolerated as poetic freedom what was the essence of all poetry. The
introduction of the chorus, according to Schiller, was the decisive step with
which war was declared openly and nobly against 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.” I suspect, by contrast, 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 romance novels of the present time. Only let
no one pester us with the claim that with this we have overthrown the artistic
“pseudo-idealism” of Schiller and Goethe.
Of course, it is an “ideal” stage on which,
following Schiller's correct insight, the Greek satyr chorus, the chorus of the
primitive tragedy, customarily strolled, a stage lifted high above over the real
strolling stage of mortal men. For this chorus the Greeks constructed a
suspended hovering framework of an imaginary natural condition 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 that it is a world arbitrarily
fantasized somewhere between heaven and earth. It is much rather a world
possessing the same reality and credibility for the devout Greek as the world of
Olympus, together with its inhabitants. The satyr as the Dionysian chorus member
lives in a reality permitted by religion, sanctioned by myth and culture. 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 lamplight is by daylight.
In just such a manner, I believe, the cultured Greek felt himself neutralized by
the sight of the chorus of satyrs. This is the most direct effect of Dionysian
tragedy: generally, the state and society, 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, which as I have
already indicated, true tragedy leaves us, that at the bottom of everything, in
spite of all the transformations in phenomena, life is indestructibly power and
delightful, this consolation appears in lively clarity as the chorus of satyrs,
the chorus of natural beings, who live, as it were, behind civilization, who
cannot disappear, 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,
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 the denial of the will of Buddhism.
Art saves him, and through art life saves him.
The ecstasy of the Dionysian state, with its
destruction 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. Through this gulf of oblivion,
the world of everyday reality and the Dionysian reality separate from each
other. As soon as that daily reality comes back again into consciousness, one
feels it as something disgusting. The fruit of this condition 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 now disgusts them to act, for their actions can change
nothing in the eternal nature of things. They perceive as ridiculous or
humiliating the fact that it is expected of them that they should set right a
world turned upside down. 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, too many
possibilities, so to speak. It's not a case of reflection. No! The true
knowledge, the glimpse into the cruel truth overcomes the driving motive to act,
both in Hamlet as well as in the Dionysian man.
Now no consolation has any effect. His longing
goes out over the world, even beyond the gods themselves, toward death.
Existence is denied, together with its blazing reflection in the gods or an
immortal afterlife. In the consciousness of once having glimpsed the truth, 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 the will in in the highest danger. Thus, to
be saved, it comes close to the healing magician, art. 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 in the dithyramb is the saving
fact of Greek art. The emotional fits I have just described play themselves out
by means of the world of these Dionysian attendants.
8
The satyr and the idyllic shepherd of our more
recent times are both the epitome of a longing directed toward the primordial
and natural, but with what a strong fearless grip the Greek held onto his men
from the woods, and how timidly and weakly modern man toys with the flattering
image of a delicate and gentle flute-playing shepherd! The Greek who had not
been worked on as yet by any knowledge which kept culture imprisoned saw nature
in his satyr, and so he did not yet mistake satyrs for apes. Quite the contrary:
the satyr was the primordial image of man, the expression of his highest and
strongest emotions, as an inspired reveler, 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 to see in these matters the
start of tragic art: the chorus is a living wall against the pounding reality,
because it—the satyr chorus—presents existence more genuinely, truly, and
completely than does the civilized person, who generally considers himself the
only reality.
The sphere of poetry does not lie beyond this
world as the fantastic impossibility of a poet's brain. It wants to be exactly
the opposite, the unadorned expression of the truth, and it must therefore cast
off the false costume of that truth thought up by the man of culture. The
contrast of 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 appearances. 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 seems himself transformed into a satyr.
The enraptured horde of those who served Dionysus
rejoiced under the influence of such moods and insights, whose power transformed
them before their very eyes, so that they imagined 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 in Attic
tragedy re-discovered itself in chorus of the orchestra and 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.
We must now appropriate that saying of Schlegel's
in a deeper sense. The chorus is the “ideal spectator,” insofar as it is the
only onlooker, the person who sees the visionary world of the scene. A
public of spectators, as we know it, was unknown to the Greeks. In their
theatre, given the way the spectators' space was built up in terraces, raised up
in concentric rings, it was possible for everyone quite literally to look out
over the collective cultural world around him and with a 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 Dionysian men, a phenomenon which we can make out most clearly in the
experience of the actor, who, if he is really gifted, sees perceptibly before
his eyes the image of the role he has to play, hovering 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 acting 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 gaze upon, as they swarm
down from the mountain heights, as the majestic setting in the middle of which
the image of Dionysus is revealed.
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 that primitive
aesthetic phenomenon 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. The character is for him not a 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 just
possesses the capacity to see a living game going on and to live all the time
surrounded by hordes of ghosts, then that man is a poet. If someone just 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 innerly 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 right at the
beginning of the development of drama. Here is something different from the
rhapsodist, who never fuses with his images, but, like the painter, sees them
with an observing eye outside himself. In this drama there is already a
surrender of individuality by entering into a strange nature. And 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. They have become their god's
timeless servants, living beyond all regions of society. All other choral lyrics
of the Greeks are 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 reveler 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.
With this knowledge in mind, we must understand
Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus which over and over again constantly
discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images. Those choral passages
interspersed through tragedy are thus, as it were, the maternal bosom of the
entire dialogue so-called, that is, of the totality of the stage word, the drama
itself. This primordial basis of tragedy sends its vision pulsing out in several
discharges following one after the other, a vision which is entirely a dream
image and therefore epic in nature, but, on the other hand, as an
objectification of a Dionysian state, it presents not the Apollonian consolation
in illusion, but its opposite, the smashing of individuality and becoming one
with primordial being. With this, drama is the Apollonian projection of
Dionysian knowledge and effects, and thus is separated by an immense gulf from
epic.
This conception of ours provides a full
explanation for the chorus of Greek tragedy, the symbol for the total frenzied
Dionysian multitude. While, given what we are used to with the role of the
chorus on the modern stage, especially the chorus in opera, we are totally
unable to grasp how this tragic chorus could be older, more original, even more
important than the real “action” (as tradition tell us so clearly), while we
cannot then figure out why, given that traditionally high importance and
original preeminence, that chorus would be put together only out of lowly
serving creatures, at first only out of goat-like satyrs, and while for us the
orchestra in front of the acting area remains a constant enigma, we have now
come to the insight that the acting area together with the action is basically
and originally thought of only as a vision, that the single “reality” is the
chorus itself, 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, thus in its frenzy speaks the language of oracular wisdom, as the
sympathetic as well as wise person reporting the truth from the heart of the
world. So arises that fantastic and apparently offensive figure of the wise and
frenzied satyr, who is, at the same time, “the naïve man” in contrast to the
god: an image of nature and its strongest drives, 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 essential stage hero and centre of the vision, was not really
present in the very oldest periods of tragedy, but was only imagined as present.
That is, originally tragedy was 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 appeared on the stage, they did 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 and pining away in his spiritual contemplation
of her, and 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
anticipation, his emotional comparisons, his instinctive conviction—then we have
an analogy to the sensation with which the aroused Dionysian spectator sees the
god stride onto the stage, with whose suffering he has already become one.
Spontaneously he transfers the whole picture of the god, which like magic
trembles in his soul, onto that masked form and dissolves the reality of that
figure as if 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 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 also 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 sense of living” (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, in which the frenzied servant of
Dionysus feels the approach of the god. Now, from the acting area the clarity
and solemnity of the epic form speaks 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,
and beautiful. In this sense the dialogue is an image of the Greeks, whose
nature reveals itself in dancing, because in dancing the greatest power is only
latent, betraying its presence in the lithe and rich movement. The language of
the Sophoclean heroes 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 which is basically
nothing more than a light picture cast onto a dark wall, that is, an illusion
through and through) we penetrate further 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. Those illuminated illusory pictures of the
Sophoclean heroes are the reverse of that: briefly put, the Apollonian of the
mask, necessary creations of a glimpse into the inner terror of nature, are like
bright spots to heal us from the horrifying night of the disabled gaze. Only in
this sense can we think of correctly grasping the serious and significant idea
of “Greek serenity”; whereas nowadays we run into the false idea of this as a
condition of safe contentment with all of life's paths and
bridges.
The most painful figure of the Greek stage, the
unlucky Oedipus, is understood by Sophocles as the noble man who is destined for
error and misery in spite of his wisdom, but who at the end through his immense
suffering exerts a beneficial effect around him which is effective on those
different from him. 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 entire moral world may collapse, but because of these
actions a higher circle of consequences is created, which will found 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 says to us. As a poet, he shows us
first a wonderfully complicated legal knot, which the judge, link by link,
undoes, in the process destroying himself. The real joy for the Greek in this
dialectical solution is so great that a sense of powerful serenity invests the
entire work, which breaks the sting of the dreadful pre-conditions which started
the process.
In Oedipus in Colonus we run into this same
serenity, but elevated by an immeasurable transformation. Unlike the old man
afflicted with excessive suffering, a man who merely suffers as the victim of
everything which happens to him, now we have the unearthly serenity which
descends from the sphere of the gods and indicates to us that the hero in his
purely passive conduct achieves his highest action, which reaches out far over
his own life (whereas his conscious striving in his earlier life led him to pure
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 here correctly explained the poet, one
can still 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 nothing
other than that illuminated image which nature as healer 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 is a very ancient folk
belief, especially in Persia, that a wise magus could be born only out of
incest. With hindsight on Oedipus as the solver of riddles and emancipator of
his mother, what we have to interpret right away 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, then an immense natural horror (for example, incest) must have come
first as the original cause. For how could we compel nature to yield up its
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 idea stamped out in that dreadful
trinity of Oedipus's three fates: the same man who solved the riddle of nature
(the 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—especially Dionysian wisdom—is something horrific and
hostile to nature, that a man who through his knowledge pushes nature into the
destructive abyss, has to experience in himself the disintegration of nature.
“The lance of knowledge turns itself against the wise man. Wisdom is a crime
against nature.” The myth calls out such frightening statements to us. But, like
a ray of sunlight, the Greek poet touches the sublime and fearful Memnon's
Column of Myth, so that the myth suddenly begins to play out Sophoclean
melodies.
Now I'm 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 at through a metaphorical picture—that's what young Goethe knew how to
reveal 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 then
to pay no attention,
like me.”
Man, rising up into something Titanic, is
victorious over his own culture and compels the gods to unite with him, because
in his self-controlled wisdom he holds their existence and the limits to their
authority in his hand. The most marvelous thing in that poem of Prometheus,
which is, according to its basic concepts, is 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, even a presentiment of the twilight of the gods, the compelling power
for a metaphysical oneness, for a reconciliation of both these worlds of
suffering—all this is a powerful reminder of the central point and major claim
of the Aeschylean world view, which sees fate (Moira) enthroned over gods and
men as eternal justice.
With respect to 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
skeptical moods onto the Olympians. The Greek artist, in particular, in looking
back on these divinities, felt a dark sense of reciprocal dependency. And this
sense is symbolized especially in Aeschylus's Prometheus. The Titanic artist
(Prometheus) found in himself the defiant belief that he could make men and, at
the very least, destroy Olympian gods—all this through his higher wisdom, which
he, of course, was compelled to atone for in eternal suffering. The magnificent
capability of the great genius, for whom eternal suffering itself is too cheap a
price, the harsh pride of the artist—that is the content and soul of Aeschylean
poetry; whereas, Sophocles in his Oedipus makes his case by sounding out the
victory song of the holy man.
But also this meaning which Aeschylus gave the
myth does not fill the astonishing depth of its terror. The artist's joy in
being, the serenity of artistic creativity in spite of that impiety, is only a
light picture of cloud and sky, which mirrors itself in a dark ocean 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 be the case that for the Aryan being this myth has the same
defining meaning as the myth of the Fall has for the Semitic peoples, and that
both myths are, to some degree, related, as brother and
sister.
The pre-condition of this Prometheus myth is the
extraordinary value which a naïve humanity associates with fire as the true
divine protector of that rising culture. But the fact that man freely controls
fire and does not receive it merely as a gift from heaven, as a stirring
lightning flash or warming rays of the sun, appeared to these contemplative
primitive men as an outrage, a crime against divine nature. And so right there
the first philosophical problem posed an awkward insoluble contradiction between
man and god and pushed it right up to the door of that culture, like a boulder.
The best and loftiest thing which mankind can share is achieved through a crime,
and people must now accept the further consequences, namely, the entire flood of
suffering and troubles with which the offended divine presences afflict the
nobly ambitious human race. Such things must happen—an austere notion which,
through the value which it gives to a crime, stands in a curious contrast to the
Semitic myth of the Fall, in which curiosity, lying falsehoods, temptation,
lust, in short, a row of predominantly female emotions are look upon as the
origin of evil.
What distinguishes the Aryan conception is the
lofty view of an active transgression as the essentially Promethean virtue. With
this, the ethical basis of pessimistic tragedy is established together with the
justification of human evil, that is, human guilt as the penalty for that sin.
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 human world, each one of which is right in its separate way but which must
suffer for its individuality as the two worlds come close
together.
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 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 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 hurries
on,
With just one leap the man will get it done.
Anyone who understands this 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 concept. For Apollo wants to make
these separate individual worlds tranquil precisely because he establishes the
border line between them and, with his demands for self-knowledge and
moderation, always reminds us 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 prevent the movement of the entire ocean from
dying away, through the attempts of the Apollonian tendency to prescribe to the
individual waves their path and extent, from time to time the high flood of the
Dionysian destroys those small circles in which the one-sided Apollonian will
seeks to confine the Greek spirit. Now suddenly a tidal wave of the Dionysian
takes the single small individual crests on its back, just as the brother of
Prometheus, the Titan Atlas, shouldered the Earth. This Titanic impulse to
become something like 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.
In this view, the Aeschylean Prometheus is a
Dionysian mask; while, in that previously mentioned deep desire for justice
Aeschylus betrays to those who understand his paternal descent from Apollo, the
god of individuation and the limits of justice. And the double nature of the
Aeschylean Prometheus, his simultaneously Dionysian and Apollonian nature, can
be expressed in an understandable way with the following words: “Everything
present is just and unjust and both aspects are equally
justified.”
That is your world! That's what one calls a
world!
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 only
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. The fact that behind all these masks
stands a divinity, that is the fundamental reason for the frequently admired
characteristic “ideality” of those well known figures.
Someone (I don't know who) asserted that all
individuals, as individuals, have to be taken as comic and thus untragic, that
the Greeks in general could not tolerate individuals in their tragic theatre. In
fact, they seem to have felt this way. That Platonic distinction between and
evaluation of the “idea” in contrast to the “idol” in connection with likenesses
lies deeply grounded in the nature of the Greeks. 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 nets of the individual will. So now the god made manifest talks
and acts in such a way that he looks like an erring, striving, suffering
individual. The fact that he appears in general with this epic definition and
clarity is the effect of Apollo, the interpreter of dreams, who indicates to the
chorus its Dionysian state by this 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. 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 laughing 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 the mysterious end of
individuation. The initiate's 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, just as myth reveals in the
picture of the eternal sorrow of sunken Demeter, 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 concepts we already have assembled all
the components of a profound and pessimistic world view, together with the
mysterious teachings of tragedy: the basic acknowledgement of the unity of all
existing things, the idea of individuation as the ultimate foundation of all
evil, art as 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 by now the Olympian culture is 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 the end of his power, with the
Titan.
Thus the earlier age of the Titans is belatedly
brought back from Tartarus into the light once more. The philosophy of wild and
naked nature looks with the unconcealed 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 they press the mighty fist of the Dionysian
artist 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 the tragedy and partly in the secret
celebrations of the dramatic mystery celebrations, but always in the disguise of
the old myths. What power was it which liberated Prometheus from his vultures
and transformed myth to a vehicle of Dionysian wisdom? It was the Herculean
power of music. Music, which attained its highest manifestation in tragedy, had
the power 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 labeling cleverly and arbitrarily the
completely mythical dreams of their youth as 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 strong, rational eyes of an
orthodox dogmatism become classified as a closed totality of historical events
and people begin anxiously to defend the credibility of their myths, but to
resist the naturally continuing life and growth of those myths, and when the
feeling for the myth dies out and in its place the claim to put religion on a
historical footing steps onto the scene.
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.
Through tragedy myth attains its most profound content, its most expressive
form. It lifts itself up again, like a wounded hero, and with the excessive
power and wise tranquilly of a dying man, its eyes burn with its last powerful
light.
What did you want, you rascal Euripides, when you
sought to force this dying man once more into your service? He died under your
powerful hands. And now you had to use a counterfeit, masked myth, which was
able only to dress itself up with the old splendour, like Hercules's monkey. And
as myth died with you, so died the genius of music as well. Even though you
plundered with greedy hands all the gardens of music, you achieved only a
counterfeit masked music. And because you abandoned Dionysus, you were then
abandoned by Apollo. Even if 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 language.
11
Greek tragedy died in a manner different from all
its ancient sister arts: it died by suicide, as a result of an insoluble (hence
tragic) conflict; whereas, all the others passed away in advanced old age with
the most beautiful and tranquil deaths. If it is an appropriately happy natural
condition to depart from life with beautiful descendants and without any painful
strains in one's life, the end of those ancient artistic genres manifests to us
such a fortunate natural state of things. They disappeared slowly, and their
more beautiful children were already standing there before their dying gaze,
impatiently lifting their heads in 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 heard from some
isolated island the shattering cry “The great god Pan is dead,” so now, like a
painful lament, rang out 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 hell, so you can for once eat your fill of the crumbs from your
former masters!”
If now a new form of art blossomed which paid
tribute to tragedy as its predecessor and mistress, it was looked upon with
fright, because while it carried the characteristics of its mother, they were
the same ones she had shown in her long death struggle. Tragedy's death struggle
was fought by Euripides, and this 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 makes understandable
the passionate fondness the poets of the newer comedies felt for Euripides.
Thus, Philemon's wish (to be hanged immediately 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 ask ourselves to indicate, briefly and without claiming to say
anything in detail, what Euripides might have in common with Menander and
Philemon and what was so excitingly exemplary and effective for them in
Euripides, it is enough to say that the spectator in Euripides is brought up
onto the stage. Anyone who recognizes the material out of which the Promethean
tragedians before Euripides created their heroes and how remote from them was
any intention of bringing the true mask of reality onto the stage will 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 great and bold features had been shown now
displayed a painful fidelity which 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
slave. 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 hustle and bustle, 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 that 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—how through him the people learned to observe in an
artistic way, with the keenest sophistication, to judge, and to draw
consequences. Because of this complete transformation in public language he also
made the new comedy possible. For from that time on there was nothing mysterious
about how ordinary life could appear on stage and what language it would
use.
Middle-class mediocrity, on which Euripides built
all his political hopes, now came into prominence. 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 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 some
extent, the choir master. Only this time the chorus of spectators had to have
practice. As soon as the chorus was well trained to sing in the Euripidean
musical key, a style of drama like a chess game arose, the new comedy, with its
continuing triumph of sly shrewdness. But Euripides, the leader of the chorus,
was incessantly praised. Indeed, people would have let themselves be killed in
order to learn more from him, if they had not been aware that tragic poets were
just as dead as tragedy itself.
With tragedy 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, and 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 it is possible to talk still 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, or 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 the
influence of this outrage we can ascribe the fact that the view of Greek
antiquity as a time of rose-coloured serenity lasted for centuries 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, moods appropriate to a
slave, or of things which testify to a completely different world view as the
basis of their existence.
Finally, when it is asserted that Euripides
brought the spectator onto the stage in order to make him really 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, firm thing of
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,
he senses that he is superior to every 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 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 threw themselves at
his feet, he nonetheless, with a sublime act of defiance, threw his own
individual attitudes in their faces, those same attitudes 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 lifetime.
Taking this into account, we see that our
expression—Euripides brought the spectator onto the stage, in order to make the
spectator 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
well known everywhere how Aeschylus and Sophocles during their lifetime 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 (Euripides), constantly under the urge to create, away from the
path above which shone the sun of the greatest poetic names and the cloudless
sky of popular approval? What curious consideration of 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 higher than the masses, but not higher
than 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
the 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 in
every celebratory presentation, into the souls of his stage heroes. Following
the demands of these two judges, he sought out for his heroes new characters, a
new language, and a new tone. In the vote of these two spectators alone he heard
judgment pronounced on his creation, just as much as he heard 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 can say that the
extraordinarily richness of his critical talent, like that of Lessing,
constantly stimulated, even if it did not create, an additional productive
artistic drive. With 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 encountered something familiar to
those who know the profound secrets of Aeschylean tragedy: he became aware of
something incommensurable in each feature and in each line, a certain deceptive
clarity and, at the same time, an enigmatic depth, the infinity of the
background.
The clearest figure still always 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 old 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 the straightforward characters. So 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. Since his reason counted for him
as the root of all enjoyment and creativity, he had to ask 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 incommensurability 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 fight the immense battle
against the art works of Aeschylus and Sophocles—not with critical writings, but
as a dramatic poet, who sets up the presentation of his tragedy in opposition to
the tradition.
12
Before we designate this other spectator by name,
let's linger here a moment to reconsider that characteristic duality and
incommensurability at the heart of Aeschylean tragedy (something we described
earlier). Let us think about how strange we find the chorus and the hero of
those tragedies, which were not able to reconcile with what we are used to or
with our traditions, until we 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
propounded as emphatically as possible the question about the value and meaning
of this tendency in a myth to his contemporaries. 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 intelligent opponent, like Pentheus in the Bacchae, is
unexpectedly charmed by Dionysus and runs from him in this enchanted state to
his destruction.
The judgment of the two old men, Cadmus and
Tiresias, seems also to be the judgment of the aged poet: the mind 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, the god might still possibly take
offense at such a lukewarm participation and transform the diplomat finally into
a dragon (as happens here with Cadmus).
The poet tells us this, a poet who fought
throughout his long life against Dionysus with heroic force, only to conclude
his life finally 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 is a protest
against the practicality of his artistic program, and that program had already
succeeded! A miracle had taken place: just when the poet recanted, his program
was already victorious. Dionysus had already been chased off the tragic stage,
and by a daemonic power speaking out from Euripides. But Euripides was, to some
extent, 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 now how much Euripides might 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's get closer now to this Socratic project,
with which Euripides fought against and conquered Aeschylean
tragedy.
What purpose (that's the question we need to ask
at this point) could Euripides' intention to ground drama solely on the
un-Dionysian have had, if we assume its implementation had the very highest
ideals? What form of drama 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 tragical effect is naturally
unattainable.
This is not a matter of the content of the
represented events. I might even 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 it magically
transforms the most horrific things through that joy in and redemption through
appearances right before our very eyes. The poet of the dramatic epic cannot
completely fuse with his pictures, any more than the epic rhapsodist can. It is
always a matter of still calm, tranquil contemplation with open eyes, a state
which sees the images in front of it. The actor in this dramatic epic remains,
in the most profound sense, still a rhapsodist; the consecration of the inner
dream lies upon all his actions, so that he is never completely an
actor.
How is Euripides' work related with respect to
this ideal of Apollonian drama? It is just like the relationship of the solemn
rhapsodist of the olden times to the younger attitude, whose nature is described
in Plato's Ion: “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 knocks.” Here we do not see any more the epic
dissolution of the self in appearances, the disinterested coolness of the real
actor, who remain, even in his highest achievements, 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 method of arousing people are detached paradoxical
ideas, substituted for Apollonian objects of contemplation, and fiery emotional
effects, substituted for Dionysian enchantment. The fiery effects are, to be
sure, imitated with a high degree of realism, but the ideas and emotional
effects are not in the slightest way imbued with the spirit of
art.
If we have now recognized that Euripides did not
succeed in basing his drama solely on Apollonian principles, that his
un-Dionysian tendencies much rather led him astray into an inartistic
naturalism, we are now able to move closer to the essential quality of his
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 at
hand, Euripides measured all the individual features and justified them
according to this principle: the language, characters, dramatic construction,
the choral music.
What we habitually assess so frequently in
Euripides, in comparison with Sophoclean tragedy, as a poetical deficiency and a
backward step is for the most part the product of his emphatic critical process,
his daring intelligence. Let the Euripi dean prologue serve as an example of
what that rationalistic method produces. Nothing can be more offensive to our
stage techniques than the prologue in Euripides's plays. 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 even
what will occur in the unfolding of the work, that would strike a modern
poetical dramatist as a wanton, inexcusable abandonment of all the effects of
suspense. If we 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 later real event.
Euripides thought quite differently about the matter.
The effect of tragedy never depends on epic
suspense, on the tempting uncertainty about what will happen now and later. It
depends 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 storm.
Everything was preparing for pathos, not for action. What did not prepare the
way for paths was considered disposable. But what hinders most seriously the
listener's delighted devotion to such scenes is any missing part, any 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 character, his breathless sympathy with and fear for them are not possible.
The Aeschylean-Sophoclean tragedies made use of the most elegant artistic
methods in the opening scenes to provide the spectators, as if by chance, all
the necessary clues to understand everything, a technique in which their noble
artistry proves its worth by allowing the necessary features to appear, but, so
to speak, as something masked and accidental.
But Euripides still believed he noticed that
during these 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 was 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—a divinity would necessarily confirm the outcome of the
tragedy for the public, more or less, and take away any doubts about the reality
of the myth, in a manner similar to the way in which Descartes could establish
the reality of the empirical world 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. That is the task of the notorious deus ex machina. Between the
epic prologue and epilogue 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 must be bringing alive in drama the opening
of Anaxagoras's text, the first lines of which go as follows: “In the beginning
everything was a confused mixture, but then came reason and created order.” And
if, among philosophers, Anaxagoras, with his concept of mind, seems to be the
first sober man among total drunkards, so Euripides might have conceptualized
his relationship to the other poets with a similar image. So long as the single
creator of order and ruler of all, the mind, was still excluded from artistic
creativity, everything was still mixed up in a chaotic primordial pudding.
That's how Euripides must have thought about it; that's how he, 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 the creative capability of poets and how this is not a conscious
understanding, but for the most part only ironically, and he draws a comparison
with the talent of prophets and dream interpreters, for 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 (which Plato also took on) 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
to the Socratic saying, “Everything must be conscious in order to be
good.”
With this in mind, it is permissible for us to
assess Euripides as the poet of Socratic aesthetics. Socrates, however, was that
second spectator, who did not understand the old tragedy and therefore did not
value it. With Socrates as his ally, Euripides dared to be the herald of a new
artistic creativity. If old tragedy perished in this development, then Socratic
aesthetics is the murdering principle. 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
himself made the powerful god fly 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.
13
That Socrates had a close relationship to
Euripides' project did not escape their contemporaries in ancient times, and the
clearest expression for this happy intuition is the rumour floating around
Athens that Socrates was in the habit of helping Euripides with his poetry. Both
names were invoked 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 strength of 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 these men, to the
irritation of the newer generations, who, although happy enough to betray
Euripides, were always totally amazed that Socrates appeared in Aristophanes as
the first and most important sophist, the mirror and essence of all sophistic
ambitions. As a result, they took consolation in putting Aristophanes himself in
the stocks as an impudent lying Alcibiades of poetry. Without here defending the
profound instinct of Aristophanes against such attacks, I will proceed to
demonstrate the close interrelationship between Socrates and Euripides as the
ancients saw it.. It's particularly important to remember in this connection
that Socrates, as an opponent of tragic art, never attended the performance of a
tragedy, and only joined the spectators when a new piece by Euripides was being
produced. The best known connection, 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 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 this new and
unheard of high opinion of knowledge and reason 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 had no
correct and clear insight into their occupations and carried out their work
instinctually. “Only from instinct”— with this expression we touch upon the
heart and centre of the Socratic project.
With this expression Socratic thought condemns
existing art as well as contemporary ethics. Wherever he directs his searching
gaze, he sees a lack of insight and the power of delusion, and from this 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, one
solitary individual, stepped forward with an expression of contempt and
superiority, as the pioneer of a brand new style of culture, art, and morality,
into that world, a scrap of which we would count it an honour to
catch.
That is the immensely disturbing thing which grips
us about Socrates whenever we run into him and which over and over again always
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 very essence of Greece, which with Homer, Pindar,
Aeschylus, Phidias, Pericles, Pythia, and Dionysus is certainly worthy of our
highest veneration? What daemonic force is it that could dare to sprinkle this
magic drink into 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
our beautiful world with your mighty fist. It is collapsing, falling to
pieces!”
A key to the heart of Socrates is offered by that
amazing phenomenon indicated by the term Socrates's daimonon. Under
special circumstances in which his immense reasoning power was stalled in doubt,
he resolved his irresolution firmly with a divine voice which expressed itself
at such times. When this voice came, it always sounded a cautionary note. In
this totally strange character instinctive wisdom reveals itself only in order
to confront the conscious knowledge now and then as an impediment. Whereas in
all productive men instinct is the truly creative and affirming power, and
consciousness acts as a critical and cautioning reaction, in Socrates the
instinct becomes the critic, consciousness becomes the creator—truly a monstrous
defect.
Now, we see here a grotesque defect in mythical
consciousness, so that Socrates can be considered specifically a non-mystic man
in whom the logical character has become too massive through excessive use, just
like instinctive wisdom in the mystic. On the other hand, it was impossible for
that logical drive, as it appeared in Socrates, to turn against itself. In its
unfettered rush it demonstrates a natural power of the sort we meet, to our
shuddering surprise, only in the very greatest instinctive powers. Anyone who
has sensed in the Platonic texts the merest scent of the god-like naïveté and
confidence in the direction of Socrates's teaching has also felt how that
immense drive wheel of Socratic logic is, at it were, in motion behind Socrates
and how we have to see this behind 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 is as
impossible as it is to approve of his influence on the removal of instinct. When
Socrates was hauled before the assembly of the Greek state, there was only one
form of sentence for this irreconcilable conflict, namely, banishment. People
should have expelled him beyond the borders as something enigmatic,
unclassifiable, and inexplicable, so that some future world could not justly
charge the Athenians with acting shamefully.
The fact that death and not 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
the same tranquility Plato describes him showing as he leaves the Symposium, the
last drinker in the early light of dawn, beginning a new day, while behind him,
on the benches and the ground, his sleeping dinner companions stay behind, to
dream of Socrates the truly erotic man. The dying Socrates was the new ideal of
the noble Greek youth, never seen before. Right in the vanguard, the typical
Greek youth, Plato, prostrated himself before Socrates's picture with all the
fervent adoration of his passionately enthusiastic soul.
14
Let's now imagine that one great Cyclops eye of
Socrates focused 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. Then what must that eye
have seen in the “lofty and highly praised” tragic art, as Plato calls it?
Something really unreasonable, with causes without effects, actions which
apparently had no causes, and as a whole so varied and with so many different
elements that any reasonable person had to reject it, but dangerous tinder for
sensitive and easily excitable minds. We know which single form of poetry
Socrates understood: Aesop's fables. And no doubt his reaction involved 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, apart from the fact that it did address itself to those
“without much sense,” and thus not to philosophers, a double excuse to keep
one's distance from it. Like Plato, he assigned it to the art of cosmetics,
which present only a pleasant surface, not the useful, and he therefore demanded
that his disciples abstain and stay away from such unphilosophical temptations,
with so much success that the young poet of tragedy, Plato, immediately burned
his poetical writing in order to be able to become Socrates's student. But where
invincible talents fought against the Socratic instructions, his power, together
with the force of his immense personality, was always still strong 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 naïve cynicism of his master. But completely from artistic necessity he had
to create an art form related directly to the existing art forms which he had
rejected. The major criticism which Plato made about the old art—that it was the
imitation of an illusion and thus belonged to a lower level than the empirical
world—must above all not be directed against his new work of art. And so we see
Plato exerting himself to go beyond reality and to present the Idea which forms
basis of that pseudo-reality.
With that, however, the thinker Plato reached by a
detour the very place where, as a poet, he had always been at home and from
where Sophocles and all the old art was protesting against Plato's criticism. If
tragedy had assimilated all earlier forms of art, so the same holds true, in an
odd way, for Plato's dialogues, which were created from a mixture of all
available styles and forms and hover between explanation, lyric, drama, 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 philosophers went even further
along the same path. With their excessively garish and motley collection of
styles, weaving back and forth between prose and metrical forms, they produced
the literary image of “raving Socrates,” which they were in the habit of
presenting in their own lives.
The Platonic dialogue was, so to speak, the boat
on which the shipwreck of the old poetry, along with all its children, was
saved. Pushed together into a single narrow space and with an anxious Socrates
at the helm they humbly set off now into a new world, which never could see
enough fantastic images of this event. Plato really gave all later worlds 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 the relative priorities of
poetry and dialectical philosophy were the same as the relative priorities of
that very philosophy and theology for many hundreds of years. Poetry, in other
words, was subservient. This was poetry's new position, the place into which
Plato forced it under the influence of the daemonic
Socrates.
Now philosophical ideas grew up around art and
forced it to cling to the trunk of dialectic. Apollonian tendencies
metamorphosed into logical systematizing, something corresponding to what we
noticed with Euripides, as well as a translation of the Dionysian into
naturalistic effects. 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 a cool conscious brightness, that optimistic element, which,
once pushed into tragedy, gradually overruns its Dionysian regions and
necessarily drives 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 perceptible link between virtue and knowledge, belief and
morality. Now the transcendental vision of justice in Aeschylus is lowered to
the flat and impertinent principle of “poetical justice” with its customary
deus ex machina.
What does this new Socratic optimistic stage world
look like with respect to the chorus and the whole musical-Dionysian basis for
tragedy in general? All that seem to be something accidental, a reminder of the
origin of tragedy which we can well do without, because we have come to realize
that the chorus can be understood only as the origin of tragedy and the tragic
in general. Already in Sophocles the chorus reveals itself as something of an
embarrassment, an important indication that even with him the Dionysian stage of
tragedy was beginning to fall apart. He did not dare to trust the Chorus to
carry the major share of the action, but limited its role to such an extent that
it appears almost as one of the actors, just as if it had been lifted out of the
orchestra into the scene. This feature naturally destroys its nature completely,
no matter how much Aristotle approved of this arrangement of the
chorus.
This demotion in the position of the chorus, which
Sophocles certainly recommended in 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 imaginary presentation of
Dionysian states, as a perceptible symbolizing of music, as the dream world of a
Dionysian intoxication.
We have noticed an anti-Dionysian tendency already
effective before Socrates, which only achieves in him an expression of
incredible brilliance. Now we must not shrink back from the question of where
such a phenomenon as Socrates points. For we are not in a position, given the
Platonic dialogues, to see that phenomenon as a force of totally negative
dissolution. And so, while it's true that the immediate effect of the Socratic
drive was to bring about the destruction of Dionysian tragedy, the profound
living experiences of Socrates himself force us to the question whether or not
there must necessarily be only an antithetical relationship between Socrates's
doctrines and art and whether the birth of an “artistic Socrates” is in general
something of a contradiction.
Where culture is concerned, that despotic logician
now and then had the feeling of a gap, an emptiness, a partial sense of reproach
for a duty he might have neglected. As he explains to his friends in prison,
often one and the same dream apparition came to him, always with the words,
“Socrates, practise music!” He calmed himself, right up to his last days, with
the interpretation that his philosophizing was the highest musical art, and
believed that it was incorrect that a divinity would remind him of “common,
popular music.” Finally in prison he came to understand how, in order to relieve
his conscience completely, to practice that music which 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 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: Have
I always labeled unintelligible things I could not understand? 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 ominous question we must
how discuss how the influence of Socrates has spread out over later worlds,
right up to the present and even into all future ages, like a constantly growing
shadow in the evening sun, and 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. For
this fact to be acknowledged, before it was established that all art inherently
depended on the Greeks, from Homer right up to Socrates, we had to deal with
these Greeks as the Athenians dealt with Socrates. Almost every age and cultural
stage has at some time or another sought in an ill-tempered frame of mind to
free itself of the Greeks, because in comparison with the Greeks, all their
achievements, apparently fully original and admired in all sincerity, suddenly
appeared to lose their colour and life and were reduced to unsuccessful copies,
even caricatures.
And so a heartfelt inner anger constantly kept
breaking out against that arrogant little nation which dared throughout time to
define everything that was not produced in its own country as “barbaric” Who
were these Greeks, people asked themselves, who 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 taken a pre-eminent place among nations for their value and
special importance, something fitted for a genius among the masses?
Unfortunately people were not lucky enough to find the cup of hemlock which can
do away with such a being, for all the poisons they created—envy, slander, and
inner anger—were insufficient to destroy that self-satisfied
magnificence.
Hence, confronted by the Greeks, people have been
ashamed and afraid. It seems that an individual who values the truth above
everything else might dare to propose as true the notion that the Greeks drive
the chariot of our culture and every other one, but that almost always the wagon
and the horses are inferior material and cannot match the glory of their
drivers, who then consider it funny to whip such a team into the abyss, over
which they themselves jump with a leap worthy 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
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, takes an infinite
satisfaction in the present and is, like the artist, protected by that
satisfaction from the practical effects of pessimism with its lynx eyes which
glow only in the darkness. But while the artist, in his 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 thrown off and takes his greatest delight in the process of
continually successful unveiling, a success which his own power has brought
about.
There would be no scientific knowledge if it
concerned itself only with that one naked goddess and had nothing else to do.
For then its disciples would have to feel like those people who want to dig a
hole straight through the earth, and one among 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
very eyes by the work of the person next to him, so that a third person would
apparently do well to select a new place for the tunneling efforts he undertakes
on his own initiative.
Now, if one person convincingly demonstrates that
it is impossible to reach the antipodes by this direct route, who will want to
continue to work on in the old depths, unless there was a possibility in the
meantime that he would be happy finding some valuable rock or discovering some
natural law? For that reason, Lessing, the most noble theoretical man, dared to
state that for him the search for the truth counted for more than truth itself.
That statement unmasks the fundamental secret of scientific knowledge, to the
astonishment, even the anger, of scientists. Now, of course, alongside this
single recognition, excessively truthful and brave, stands a profound but
delusive image, which first came into the world in the person of Socrates, that
unshakeable faith that thinking, guided by the idea of causality, might reach
into the deepest abyss of being, and that thinking is capable of, not just
understanding being, but even correcting it. This lofty metaphysical delusion is
inherent in scientific research and leads it over and over again to its limits,
at which point it must turn itself into art, something which is really
predictable in this mechanical process.
With the torch of this idea, let's look at
Socrates. To us he appears as the first person who was capable not only of
living under the guidance of this scientific instinct, but also of dying under
it (something much more difficult). Therefore the picture of the dying Socrates
as a man raised above fear of death by knowledge and reason is the emblazoned
shield hanging over the entranceway to scientific research, 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 finally serve, something which I have just noted as the
necessary consequence, indeed, even the purpose of,
science.
Anyone who clearly sees how, after Socrates, that
mystagogue of knowledge, one philosophical school after another, like wave after
wave, arose in turn, and how an unimaginable universal greed for knowledge
through the full extent of the educated world steered knowledge 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
scientific knowledge, and how through this universal greed a common net of
thinking was cast over the entire earth for the first time (with even glimpses
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 that in Socrates we see a turning point and vortex of
so-called world history.
Imagine for a moment the following scenario: if
the incalculable sum of all the energy which has been used in pursuit of this
world project is spent not in the service of knowledge but on the practical
(i.e., egotistical) aims of individuals and peoples, then in all probability the
instinctive delight in living would be so weakened in universal wars of
destruction and continuing migrations of people that, with suicide being a
common occurrence, the individual, perhaps out of a sense of duty, would have to
see death as a final rest and, like the inhabitants of the Fiji Islands, the son
would strangle his parents, the friend would strangle his friend. A practical
pessimism, which could give rise to a dreadful ethic of mass murder out of
sympathy, such a belief is present and was present all over the world, wherever
art did not appear in some form or other, especially in religion and science, as
a remedy and a defense against that pestilence.
With respect to this practical pessimism, Socrates
is the original picture of the theoretical optimist, who in the belief (which I
have described) that we could discover the nature of things conferred upon
knowing and discovering the power of a universal medicine and understood
evil-in-itself as error. To push forward with that reasoning and to separate
true knowledge from appearance and error seem to the Socratic man to be the
noblest, even the single truly human vocation, just as that mechanism of ideas,
judgments, and conclusions has been valued, from Socrates on, as the highest
activity and the most admirable gift of nature, above all other faculties. Even
the noblest moral deeds, the sympathetic emotions, self-sacrifice, 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 from the dialectic of knowledge and
therefore described as teachable.
Whoever has experienced the delight of a Socratic
discovery and feels how this, in ever-widening rings, seeks to enclose the
entire world of phenomena, will experience 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 these actions will consist, for
the most part, like those of a mid-wife, of things concerned with the education
of noble disciples, in order to produce an endless supply of
geniuses.
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 fails. 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 some
border point on that circumference, where he stares at something which cannot be
illuminated. When, at this point, he sees to his horror how logic turns around
on itself and finally bites its own tail, then a new form of knowledge breaks
through, the acknowledgement of the tragic, which in order merely to be endured,
requires art as a protector and healer.
If we look at the loftiest realms of the world
streaming around us, our eyes strengthened and refreshed by the Greeks, we
become aware of that greed of insatiably optimistic knowledge (which Socrates
previews for us) 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 especially loathe Dionysian tragic art, as I have
already explained in the example of the conflict between Aeschylean tragedy and
Socratic doctrine.
Here we are now knocking, with turbulent feelings,
on the door of the present and future: Will that transformation lead to
continuously new configurations of genius and straight to the music-playing
Socrates? Will that wide net of art, whether in the name of religion or of
science, fly over existence 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 as lookers on, worried but not without hope, for we are being
permitted to witness that immense struggle and transition. Ah, but there is a
magic spell in these battles: whoever looks at them must also fight
them!
16
By setting out this historical example, we have
attempted to clarify how tragedy surely dies away with the disappearance of the
spirit of music, since tragedy can arise only out of this spirit. To mitigate
the strangeness of this claim and, on the other hand, to indicate the origin of
this idea 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 artistic need for
tragedy.
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 taken hold to such an extent that, for
example, in the art of the theatre, only farces and ballets achieve a fairly
rich profit with their fragrant blooms, which are perhaps not for everyone. I
shall speak only of the most illustrious opposition to the tragic world view: by
that I mean research scholarship, optimistic to the core of its being, with its
father Socrates perched on the pinnacle. Shortly I shall also indicate by name
the forces which seem to me to guarantee a new birth of tragedy and who knows
what other blessed hopes for the German character!
Before we leap into the middle of this battle, let
us wrap ourselves in the armour of the knowledge 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, very different in their
deepest being and their highest goals. Apollo stands before me as the
transfigured genius of the principium individuationis [the
individualizing principle], through which release is only to be truly
attained in illusion. However, under the mystical joyous cries of Dionysus, the
spell of individuation shatters 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 Apollonian and music as Dionysian art became
more or less obvious to only one great thinker, when he, without any prompting
from the symbolism of the Greek gods, recognized the different character of
music and the origin of all other arts from it, because music is not, like all
the others art forms, images of appearances, but an immediate reflection of the
will itself, and also because it presents itself as the metaphysical counterpart
to all physical things in the world, the thing-in-itself as counterpart to all
appearances (Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea, I, p.
310).
On the basis of this most significant way of
understanding all aesthetics, which, taken seriously, marks the first beginning
of aesthetics, Richard Wagner, to confirm its lasting truth, set his stamp, when
he established in his 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, has become accustomed to the idea of
beauty asserting itself in the world of images and to demand from music an
effect similar to the effect of plastic arts, namely, the arousal of
satisfaction in beautiful forms.
After my recognition of that tremendous
opposition, I sensed in myself a strong urge to approach the essence of Greek
tragedy and, in so doing, the deepest insight into the Hellenic genius. Now for
the first time I believed I was capable of the magical task of posing the basic
problem of tragedy in my own mind, over and above the jargon of our customary
aesthetics. Through that, such an strange idiosyncratic glimpse into the
Hellenic was granted to me that it had to appear to me as if our
classical-Hellenistic scholarship (which is so proud of itself) had up to this
point known, for the most part, only how to gloat over games with shadows and
trivialities.
We may be able perhaps to touch on this original
problem with the following question: What aesthetic effect arises when those
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? Richard Wagner applauded Schopenhauer on this very
point for the restrained clarity and perceptiveness of his explanation.
Schopenhauer 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 analogy mediating between the two of
them. Thus, an understanding of this thing is required in order to have insight
into that analogy. Consequently, music, when considered as an expression of the
world, is universal to the highest degree, something which even has a
relationship with the universality of ideas, rather like the way these are
related to particular things. Its universality is, however, in no way the 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 always 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, are there to express 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, like its innermost soul, without the
body.
From these inner relationships 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
seems to come forward as the most correct and clearest commentary on them. In
the same way, for the man who surrenders himself entirely to the experience of a
symphony it appears as if he saw all the possible events of life and the world
drawn over into himself. Nevertheless, he cannot, if he thinks about it,
perceive any similarity between that game of sounds and the things which come
into his mind.
For music is, as mentioned, different from all
other arts, in that it is not a portrayal of appearances, or more correctly, the
adequate objectification of the will, but the unmediated portrayal of the will
itself, as well as the metaphysical complement of all physical things in the
world, presenting the thing-in-itself as complement to all appearances. We
could, therefore, call the world the embodiment of music just as much as the
embodiment of the will. And that's why it is understandable that music is
capable of bringing out every painting, even 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 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 as a vivid presentation in pantomime or as both in an opera. Such
individual pictures of men's lives, given a foundation in the universal speech
of music, are not bound to music and do not correspond with music by a
compelling necessity, but they 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 abstraction from the real. For reality, the world of separate
things, supplies clear phenomena, remarkable and individual things, the single
case, to both the universality of ideas and the universality of melodies. Both
of these universals, however, are, from a certain point of view, contrary, since
ideas consist only of forms abstracted first from perception, rather like the
stripped away outer skin of things, and are thus really and entirely
abstractions.; whereas, music, by contrast, gives the heart of the thing, the
innermost core, which comes before all particular shapes. This relationship is
easily expressed properly in the language of the scholastics: 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).
The fact that in general there can be a connection
between a musical composition and a perceptible presentation 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
and the composer has known how to express in the universal language of music the
dynamics of the will, which constitutes the core of the event, then the melody
of the song, the music of the opera, is full of expression. The composer's
discovery of the analogy between both must, however, issue from the immediate
realization of the world 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, that is, the will itself, but only imitates
inadequately its appearance.
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 in such a vital manner and to embody it in ourselves through a
metaphorical 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 arouses us
to consider an image, in some way similar to the Dionysian universality, and
music then permits that image to come forward with the highest
significance.
From this 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, indeed, of giving
birth to the tragic myth, that myth which speaks of the recognition of the
Dionysian among the Greeks. I have explained the phenomenon of the lyric poet,
and after that how music in the lyric poet strives to make known its essence in
Apollonian pictures. Let us now imagine that music at its highest intensity also
must seek to reach its highest representation. Thus, 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 tragedy
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. Now,
individual examples of such a destruction makes clear the eternal phenomenon of
Dionysian art, which brings into expression the will in its omnipotence out from
behind, so to speak, the principium individuationis, the life beyond all
appearances and eternal life, 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 unmediated idea of this
life. The work of the plastic artist has an entirely 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 incessantly changing
phenomena the eternal primordial mother, always forcing things into existence,
always satisfied with the changing nature of appearances!”
17
Dionysian art also wants to convince us of the
eternal delight in existence. But we must seek this delight, not in appearances,
but behind them. We must recognize how everything which comes into being must be
ready for a painful destruction. We are forced to gaze directly into the terror
of individual existence but, in the process, must not 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, torment, and
destruction of appearances we now consider necessary, on account of the excess
of countless forms of existence forcefully thrusting themselves into life, and
of the exuberant fecundity of the world's 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 we sense the
indestructible and eternal nature of this Dionysian joy. In spite of fear and
compassion, we are fortunate vital beings, not as individuals, but as the one
force of Life, 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,
reached a true understanding of the original and astonishing meaning of the
chorus. At the same time, however, we must concede that the significance of the
tragic myth explained previously, to say nothing of Greek philosophy, was never
entirely clear to the Greek poets. Their heroes speak to a certain extent more
superficially than they act, and the myth does not really 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,
similarly speaks in a more superficial manner than he acts, so that we derive
the above mentioned study of Hamlet, not from the words, but from the deepest
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 that incongruity between myth and word can easily seduce us into
considering it shallower and more empty of meaning than it is, and thus to
assume a more superficial action 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 achieve successfully at any time as a
creating musician.
Admittedly through scholarship we must recreate
the extraordinary power of the musical effects in order to receive something of
that incomparable consolation necessarily characteristic of true tragedy. But we
would experience this extraordinary musical power for what it is only if we were
Greeks, because considering the entire development of Greek music, which is well
known, quite familiar to us, and infinitely richer by comparison, we believe we
are hearing only youthful songs, sung with only a timid sense of their power.
The Greeks are, as the Egyptian priests say, eternal children, and where tragic
art is concerned, only children who do not know what an exalted toy has arisen
under their hands, something which will be destroyed.
Every 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 developing in 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 its most amazing transformations and
degeneration never stops attracting serious natures to it. Isn't it possible
that it will rise from its mystical depths as art once
more?
At this point we are concerned with the question
whether the power whose hostile effects broke tragedy has sufficient power for
all time to hinder the artistic re-growth of tragedy and the tragic world view.
If the old tragedy was derailed by the dialectical drive for knowledge and by
the optimism of scholarly research, we might have to infer from this fact an
eternal struggle between the theoretical and the tragic world views. And only
after the spirit of knowledge is taken right to its limits and its claim to
universal validity destroyed by the establishment of that limit would it be
possible to hope for a re-birth 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 opposition I understand with respect to the spirit of
scholarly research the belief (which first came to light in the person of
Socrates) that our understanding of nature can be grounded and that knowledge
has a universal healing power.
Whoever remembers the most immediate consequences
of this restless forward driving spirit of scientific knowledge will immediately
recall how it destroyed myth and how through this destruction poetry was driven
out of its naturally ideal soil as something from now on without a home. If we
have correctly ascribed to music the power to bring about out of itself a
re-birth of myth, then we will have to seek out the spirit of science on that
very 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 innerly
degenerate music those with a true musical nature turned away with the same
aversion which they had displayed before the art-killing tendency of
Socrates.
The instinct of Aristophanes (which grasped issues
so surely) 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 and smelling in all three of them the characteristics of a
degenerate culture. Through that new dithyramb, music is criminally turned into
a mimetic demonstration of appearances, for example, a battle or storm at sea,
and in the process is totally robbed of all its power to create myths. For when
music seeks only to arouse our indulgence by compelling us to find external
analogies between an event in life or 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 must be
vividly felt as a single instance of universality and truth staring into the
infinite.
Truly Dionysian music works on us as a universal
mirror reflecting the will of the world. Each vivid event reflected in this
mirror widens out at once for our feelings into the image of an eternal truth.
By contrast, the sound painting of the new dithyramb immediately strips such a
vivid event of its mythic character. Now the music has become a feeble copy of a
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
plays itself feebly out in marches, trumpet calls, and so forth, and our
imagination is held back precisely by these
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 more impoverished than it is, whereas through Dionysian music
the individual phenomenon becomes richer and widens into an image of the world.
It was a powerful victory of the non-Dionysian spirit when, in the development
of the new dithyramb, it alienated music from itself and pushed it down to be
the slave of appearances. Euripides, who, in a higher sense, must have had a
thoroughly unmusical nature, is for this very reason an ardent supporter of the
new 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 way in which the presentation of character
and the psychological complexities get way out of hand in the tragedies of
Sophocles. The character cannot be allowed to broaden out any more into an
eternal type, but, by contrast, must appear an individual through the artistic
qualifications and shading, through 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 also we become aware of the victory of
appearances over the universal and of the delight in the particular, rather like
an anatomical specimen. Already we breathe the air of a theoretical world, which
values the scientific insight higher than the artistic mirror image of a
universal principle. The movement along the line of increasing characterization
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 new Attic comedy there are masks with only one
expression, reckless old men, deceived pimps, mischievous slaves in an
inexhaustible repetition.
Where now has the myth-building spirit of music
gone? What is left now for music is music of stimulation or memory, that is,
either music as 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 unapologetic
successors?
However, the new un-Dionysian spirit manifests
itself with the utmost clarity in the conclusions of the new plays. In the old
tragedy, the metaphysical consolation was there to feel at the conclusion.
Without that, the delight in tragedy simply cannot be explained. The sound of
reconciliation from another world echoes most purely perhaps in Oedipus at
Colonus. But as soon as the genius of music flew away from tragedy, tragedy
is, in the strong sense of the term, dead. For out of what are people now 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 was paid a well earned reward in an impressive marriage, in divine testament
to his honour. The hero became a gladiator, to whom people gave his freedom,
after he had been well beaten and was covered with wounds. The deus ex
machina moved in to take the place of metaphysical consolation. I will not
say that the tragic world view was destroyed entirely and completely by the
surging spirit of the un-Dionysian. We only know that it must have fled out of
art as if into the underworld, degenerating into a secret
cult.
But over the widest surface area of Hellenistic
existence raged the consuming wind of that spirit which announces itself in the
form of “Greek serenity,” to which I referred earlier as an impotent and
unproductive delight in life. This serenity is a counterpart to the marvelous
“naïveté” of the old 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, 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 already derived out of the idea of
the un-Dionysian: it fights against Dionysian wisdom and art; it strives to
dissolve myth; it places an earthy consonance in place of a metaphysical
consolation, indeed a particular deus ex machina, namely, the god of
machines and crucibles, that is, the force of nature, recognized and used in the
service of a higher egoism; it believes in correcting the world through
knowledge, a life led by scientific knowledge, and thus is really in a position
to confine the individual man in the narrowest circle of problems which can be
solved, 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 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'll be able to
cure the eternal wound of existence. Another is caught up by the seductively
beautiful veil of art fluttering before his eyes; yet 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 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 feel the
weight and difficulty of existence with more profound reluctance and who need to
be deceived out of this reluctance by these exquisite stimulants. Everything we
call culture emerges from 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 intend. For a long time now, it's been almost frightening
to sense how an educated person here is found only in the form of the scholar.
Even our literary arts have had to develop out of scholarly imitations, and in
the main effect of rhyme we recognize still the development of our poetical form
out of artificial experiments with what is essentially really a scholarly
language, not one native to us.
To a true Greek how incomprehensible
must Faust have appeared, that man of modern culture, who is inherently
intelligible to us—Faust, who storms dissatisfied through all faculties, his
drive for knowledge making 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 somewhere in the wide and 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 naïve way he was reminding us that the non-theoretical human being
is something implausible and astonishing to modern man, so that we had to have
the wisdom of a Goethe to find out that such a strange form of existence is
comprehensible, even forgivable.
And now we must 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 starts
trembling in 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 invocation of 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 precondition for all religions, is
already everywhere paralyzed—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 and while he,
in his uneasiness, reaches into the treasure of his experience for ways to avert
the danger, without any inherent faith in these means, and while he also begins
to have a premonition of his own particular consequences, some great and widely
gifted natures have, with incredibly careful thought, known how to use the tools
of science to set out the boundaries and relative nature of knowledge itself
and, in the process, decisively to deny the claim of science to universal
validity and universal goals. With proofs like this, for the first time that
delusion which presumes with the help of causality to be able to ground the
innermost essence of things has become recognized for what it
is.
The immense courage and wisdom of
Kant and Schopenhauer achieved the most difficult victory, the one 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, had 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 only reality, the highest
reality, and to set it in place as the innermost and true essence of things and
thus to make true knowledge of this essence impossible, that is, to use an
expression 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 knowledge as the
highest goal, a wisdom which, undeceived by the seductive diversions of science,
turns its unswerving gaze towards 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's imagine a growing generation with
this fearless gaze, this heroic attraction for what is immense; let's imagine the bold step of these
dragon slayers, the proud daring with which they turn their backs on all the
doctrines of weakness belonging to that optimism, in order to “live resolutely,”
fully and completely. Would that not require the tragic man of this culture in
his self-education for seriousness and terror to desire a new art, the art of
metaphysical consolation, to desire tragedy as the Helen which belongs to him
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—once by the fear of its own consequences, which it
is definitely beginning to sense, and, in addition, because it is itself no
longer convinced of the eternal validity of its foundations with that earlier
naïve trust—it can hang onto the sceptre of its infallibility only with
trembling hands. So it's a sorry spectacle—how the dance of
its thinking dashes longingly after new forms in order to embrace them and then
how, like Mephistopheles with the seductive Lamia, it suddenly, with a shudder,
lets them go.
That is, in fact, the characteristic
mark of that fracture which everyone habitually talks 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 principles of science must collapse when it begins to become illogical,
that is, when it begins to run back, away from 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 form
of this Socratic culture most precisely when we call it the culture of opera,
for in this area our Socratic culture, with characteristic naiveté, 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 recall 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, in an age in which Palestrina's
inexpressibly awe-inspiring and sacred music had just arisen? 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 a rapidly 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 only explain by some tendency beyond art, something
also 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 half-singing.
Through this intensification of pathos he makes the words easier to understand
and overpowers what's left of the musical half. 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. 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 a purely musical element, without considering the words.
This alternation of only half-sung speech full of urgent emotion 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 senses, is something so completely unnatural and at the same time so
innerly contradictory to the Dionysian and Apollonian artistic drives that we
must conclude that the origin of recitative lies outside all artistic
instincts.
According to this account, we should
define recitative as the mixing of epic and lyric performing, but not at all in
an innerly consistent blending, which could never have been attained with such
entirely disparate things, but 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. Rather they—along with their age—believed that through that stilo
rappresentativo the secret of ancient music had been resolved and that only
through it could one explain the tremendous effect of an Orpheus, Amphion, and,
indeed, even of Greek tragedy. The new style was valued as the re-awakening 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 allowed themselves to surrender to the dream that they had now
climbed down back once more into the paradisal beginnings of humankind, when
music necessarily must 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 the innermost
development of this truly modern style of art, the opera. A powerful need forces
itself out in 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 in all
his actions at the same time follows a natural artistic drive, who sings at
least something in everything he has to say, so that, given the slightest
emotional arousal, he can immediately sing 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 in which they simultaneously discovered a way of consoling themselves
against that pessimism to which the seriously 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 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 another
equally clear confirmation of my opinion that opera is constructed on the same
principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the birth of 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 completely unmusical listeners that people
had to hear 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 his servants. For the
words (they said) are nobler than the accompanying harmonic system just as the
soul is nobler than the body. In the beginning of opera, the union of music,
image, and word was treated according to the amateurish and unmusical crudity of
these views. The first experiments with the sense of this aesthetic were
launched 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 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 right 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 that
feeling has ever been in a position to create something artistic. The
precondition of opera is a false belief about the artistic process; it is, in
fact, the idyllic faith that in reality every sensitive man is an artist.
According to the meaning of this belief, opera is the expression of lay amateurs
in art, something which dictates its laws with the cheerful optimism of
theoretical man.
If we wanted to bring together into
a single conception both of these ideas I have just described in connection with
the origin of opera, all we would have left to do is to speak of an idyllic
tendency in opera—and the only things we would need to use are 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. And right away we must draw attention to the
common characteristic of both of these 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, with this
state of nature, simultaneously 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, to be brought 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 copy of man's original art world.
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 “man in himself” 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—something which
is only the 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 eternal loss—there is
rather the cheerfulness of an eternal rediscovery, the comfortable joy in an
idyllic reality which man can at least imagine for himself at all times. But in
doing this, man may perhaps at some point suspect that this imagined reality is
nothing other than a fantastically silly indulgence. Anyone able to measure this
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 playful being as opera could be chased away
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 in general do not lie in the aesthetic realm but which have rather
stolen from a half moralistic sphere over into the realm of art and which can
deceive people about its 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, under the influence of opera's idyllic seductions and its
Alexandrine arts of flattering, the highest task of art, the one we should take
really seriously—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 strivings of the will—would degenerate into a trend to
empty and scattered diversion? What happens to 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 office, 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 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
development of modern music. The optimism lurking in the genesis of opera and in
the essence of the culture represented through opera succeeded with alarming
speed in stripping music of its Dionysian world meaning and stamping on it a
formally playful and entertaining character. This transformation can only be
compared to something like the metamorphosis of Aeschylean man into the
Alexandrian cheerful man.
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 most certain favourable signs
bring us the guarantee 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. Out of the Dionysian
foundation of the German spirit a power has arisen which has nothing in common
with the most basic assumptions of Socratic culture, something those assumptions
cannot explain or excuse. Rather from the point of view of this culture it is
experienced as something terrible which cannot be explained, as something
overpoweringly hostile—and that is German music, above all as it is to be
understood in its forceful orbit from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to
Wagner.
Even in the best of circumstances
what can the Socratic man of our day, greedy for knowledge, begin to make of
this daemon rising from the inexhaustible depths? Neither from the lacework or
arabesques of operatic melodies nor with the help of the arithmetic 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 fishing net of
“beauty” all their own, strike at and try to
catch that musical genius roaming about in front of them with incredible life,
with movements which will not be judged according to eternal beauty any more
than according to notions of the sublime. We should only inspect these patrons
of music in person and at close quarters, when they cry out so tirelessly
“Beauty! Beauty!” to see whether they look like
educated and discriminating darling children of nature or whether they are not
rather 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.
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, and civilization must
at some point appear before the unerring judge Dionysus. 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 scholarly Socratism by
demonstrating its boundaries, and how with this demonstration an infinitely
deeper and more serious consideration of ethical questions and 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—that in it are stamped all those transitions and struggles in
a classically instructive form, except that we are, as it were, living through
the great high points 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 immensely powerful forces from outside had
for a long time forced it into servitude under their form, since that spirit, so
far as form is concerned, 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 Roman
civilization. If only it can now understand how to learn all the time from a
single people, the Greeks—being 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 or of being able to
interpret where it is going?
20
At some point under the gaze of an incorruptible
judge we may determine in what ages 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 some 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.
In order to avoid being forced into total despair
about the German spirit, shouldn't we conclude from all this that in some important
point or other these fighters were not successful in penetrating the Hellenic
spirit and creating a lasting bond of love between German and Greek culture? And
beyond that, perhaps an unconscious recognition of this failure gives rise in
serious people to the enervating doubt whether, after such predecessors, they
could go even further than these men had along this cultural path and reach
their goal at all. For that reason since that time we've seen judgments about the educational 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. 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 education—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, often with a sceptical abandoning of the Hellenic ideal
and a total reversal of the real purpose of classical studies. In general,
anyone in these circles who hasn't 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 also seek to acquire Greek antiquity
“historically,” as well as other antiquities, but in any case
following the methods of our present scholarly writing, along with their
supercilious expressions.
If, as a result, the real cultural power of our
institutions of higher learning has certainly never been lower and weaker than
at present, if the “journalist,” the paper slave of the day, has won his victory
over the professors so far as culture is concerned and the only thing still left
for the latter is the frequently experienced metamorphosis which has them also
moving around these days with the speech styles of a journalist, with the
“light elegance” of this sphere, like cheerful well-educated
butterflies, then how awkward and confusing it must be for people living in such
a present and educated in this manner to stare at that phenomenon of the revival
of the Dionysian spirit and the rebirth of tragedy, something which may only be
understood by some analogy to the most profound principles of the as yet
incomprehensible Hellenic genius.
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 an entire form of culture, i.e., the Socratic-Alexandrian, must have run
its full life after being able to culminate in such a delicate and insignificant
point as our present culture.
When heroes like Schiller and Goethe couldn't
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 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's 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 look in vain for a single powerfully branching
root, for a spot of fertile and healthy soil—but everywhere there is dust, sand,
ossification, and decay. Here a desperate, isolated man couldn't 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 bronze gaze, who knows how to make his way
along his terrible path, without wavering 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 such an
exhausted culture as the one I have just sketched out so gloomily 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 lifts
it like a vulture up into the air. In our bewilderment, our gaze seeks out what
has disappeared, for what we 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 are Delusion, Will, and
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 will 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 people. It is the people of tragic mystery who fight the
Persian wars, and again the people who carried on these wars uses tragedy as an
essential potion in their recovery. Who would have supposed that such a people,
after being stirred right to their innermost being for several generations by
the strongest paroxysms of the Dionysian demon, were still capable of a regular
and powerful outpouring of the simplest political feeling, the most natural
instinctive feeling for their homeland, the original manly desire to
fight?
Nonetheless, if we always sense in that remarkable
extension of oneself into one's surroundings associated with Dionysian arousal
how Dionysian release from the shackles of individuality registers at first as a
heightened indifference—even apathy and hostility—to the political instincts, on
the other hand, Apollo, the nation builder, is also the genius of the
principium individuationis [individualizing principle], and a sense of
state and homeland cannot survive without an affirmation of the individual
personality.
From ecstatic 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 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 unconditionally valid, it's equally necessary for a people
to turn to the path of the most extreme forms of 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, but for that very
reason they made it immortal. That 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 marvelous 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 people, purifying them and giving them
release. We will first sense its highest value when it confronts us, as with the
Greeks, 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
perfection. But then it places the tragic myth and the tragic hero next to the
music, who 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 avid
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 gives rise to an illusion, as if the music is
only the production's highest device for bringing life to the plastic world of
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 in which it would not dare to revel without that
deception.
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 words and pictures never could attain
without its help. And particularly through the music 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 tried to
provide only a provisional expression of this complex idea, something
immediately intelligible to few people, at this very point I cannot refrain from
encouraging my friends to a further attempt and from asking them to prepare
themselves with a single example of our common experience in order to recognize
a general principle.
With this example, I must not refer to those who
use the images of the action in the scenes—the words and emotions of active
people—in order with their help to come closer to the feeling of the music. For
none of them 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, don't even succeed in reaching the lobby. But I must turn only to
those who have an immediate relationship with music and who find in it, as it
were, their mother's womb, those who 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 as an immense symphonic movement, getting no help from words and
images, without suffocating from a convulsive spreading of all the wings of his
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 desires—and cries of woe from the “wide
space of the world's night,” without, in the midst of this shepherd's medley of
metaphysics, inexorably flying off to his original home? But what if nonetheless
such a work could 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
this music the tragic myth and the tragic hero interpose themselves, basically
only as a parable 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 parable and would remain there 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 shattered individuality with the healing balm
of blissful illusion. Suddenly we think we 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 says to us
something like “the barren, empty sea.” And where we 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 not to die from yearning!” And when earlier, after such an excess and
such a huge number of torments consuming us, the jubilation of the horns, almost
like an extreme agony, cuts through our hearts, there stands between us and this
“jubilation in itself” the celebrating Kurwenal, turned towards the ship
carrying Isolde. No matter how powerful the compassion gripping us inside, in a
certain sense, nonetheless, this compassion saves us 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 thoughts and words 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
confronted us as a plastic world, as if only Tristan's and Isolde's destiny had
been formed and stamped out in pictures 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, our longing
for great and awe-inspiring forms. It presents images of life to us and provokes
us to a thoughtful grasp of the kernel of life contained in them. With the
immense power of imagery, ideas, 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 the music only helps him see it better and with greater
profundity.
What can the skilful healing power of Apollo's
magic not achieve, if it can even excite in us this delusion, so that it seems
as if the Dionysian is really working to serve the Apollonian, capable of
intensifying its effects—in fact, as if the music was essentially an artistic
presentation of an Apollonian content?
With that pre-established harmony which reigns
between the perfect drama and its music, drama attains an extreme degree of
vividness, something which verbal drama cannot approach. In the independently
moving melodic lines all the living forms in the scene simplify themselves into
the clarity of curved lines, and the juxtaposition of these lines sounds out to
us, sympathizing in the most delicate way with the action as it moves forward.
As this happens, the relation of things becomes immediately audible 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, our inner view of the world of the stage is
infinitely widened and 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 words and ideas 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 origin of that 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 marvelous appearance, i.e.,
that previously mentioned Apollonian delusion, through whose effects we should
be relieved of the Dionysian surge and excess. In fact, the relationship between
music and drama is fundamentally the reverse—the music is the essential idea of
the word, and the drama is only a reflection of this idea, its isolated
silhouette.
This identity between the melodic line and the
living form, between the harmony and the relations of the characters in that
form, is true in an 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, to the heart of the
world. But music speaks out from this heart, and though countless appearances
could clothe themselves in the same music, they would never exhaust its
essence—they would always be only its external reflection.
And, of course, with 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 this contrast which
seems to have become, for reasons nobody knows, 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 victorious over the
primordial Dionysian elements of music and makes use of these for its own
purposes, that is, for the highest dramatic clarity, a very important
reservation naturally follows: at the most essential point of all that
Apollonian deception is broken up and destroyed. Drama, which, with the help of
music, spreads out in front of us with such innerly 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 action 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 deception
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, from his own experience, of the pure and unmixed
effect of a truly musical tragedy.
I think I have described what this effect is like, attending to both
aspects of it, so that he will now know how to clarify 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, as if, with
the help of the music, he could 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 this 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
indifference of will-less contemplation which the sculptor and the epic
poet—that is, the genuine Apollonian artist—bring out in him with their works of
art, that is, the justification of the world of the 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 his epic clarity and beauty and, nonetheless,
takes pleasure in his destruction.
He understands the scenic action to its innermost core, and yet 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 at 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 bosom of
the true and single reality, at which point it seems, like 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.
So we remember the experiences of the truly
aesthetic listener, the tragic artist himself, as he, like a voluptuous divinity
of individualism, creates his forms—in which sense his work can scarcely be
understood as an “imitation of nature”—and as his immense Dionysian drive then
devours this entire world of appearances in order to allow him, through its
destruction, to have a premonition of the original and highest artistic joy in
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 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 from which one might be able to infer aesthetic
conditions or the aesthetic capability of the listener. Sometimes pity and fear are supposed to
be pushed by the serious action to an 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 service to a moral world
order.
I have no doubt that for countless men that and
only that is precisely the effect of tragedy. But this reveals equally clearly that
all these people, together with their aesthetic interpreters, have experienced
nothing of tragedy as the highest 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 idea 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 prefer 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—after 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’re justified in claiming that only now can the
primordial phenomenon of the tragic be described with some success. Anyone who nowadays still provides
explanations in terms of those surrogate effects from spheres beyond aesthetics
and doesn’t sense that he has risen above the pathological and moralistic
processes may well despair of his aesthetic nature. For that condition we recommend as an
innocent substitute the interpretation of Shakespeare the way Gervinus does it
with 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 only synthetic and whitewashed with the
appearance of life. The performing
artist in fact didn’t really know what he could begin to do with a listener who
behaved so critically, and therefore he, together with dramatist or opera
composer who inspired him, peered anxiously for the last remnants of life in
this discriminating, 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 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 with a
pronounced and at least exciting proclivity for contemporary political and
social issues brought out such clear productions that the listener could forget
his critical exhaustion and let himself go with feelings like patriotism or
militaristic moments, or in front of the speaker’s desk in parliament or with
judicial sentences for crimes and vices.
And that necessarily led to an alienation from true artistic purposes and
directly to a culture of attitudinizing.
But here there stepped in, what in every
artificial art up to now has intervened, a ragingly quick deprivation of that
very attitudinizing, so that, for example, the view that the theatre should be
used as an institution for the moral education of a people, something taken
serious 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 and 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 society, of which we can get some sense in Schopenhauer’s parable of
the porcupines, so there has never been a time when there has been so much
chatter about art and when people think so little of it. But can’t we still associate with
someone who is in a position to entertain himself with Beethoven and
Shakespeare? Everyone may 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 is not already struck dumb with astonishment.
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 feelings 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 image of the world, 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, by compromising
with some abstractions. However,
without myth that culture forfeits its healthy creative natural power: only a
horizon reorganized through myth completes the unity of an entire cultural
movement.
Through myth
all the powers of illusion and of Apollonian dream are first rescued from their
random wandering around. The images
of myth must be the unseen, omnipresent demonic sentries under whose care the
young soul matures and by whose signs a man interprets his life and struggles
for himself. Even the state knows
no more powerful unwritten laws than the mythical foundation which guarantees
its connection to religion, its growth out of mythic ideas.
Alongside
that let’s now place abstract people, those who are not led by myths, as well as
abstract education, abstract customs, abstract law, the abstract state. Let’s remember the disorderly roaming of
artistic fantasy 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 live on a meagre diet from all other cultures—and there we
have the present, the result of that Socratism whose aim is to destroy
myth.
And now the
man without a 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 eerie inner excitements 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 usually changes into “history and criticism.”
We would
also have to experience painful despair over our German being, if it is already
inextricably intermixed in a similar way with its culture, or, indeed, if they
have 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 luck and give thanks that such a questionable culture 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 perception that
under his restless cultural life jumping around here and there and these
cultural convulsions 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. Luther’s choral works sounded as
profound, courageous, spiritual, as exhuberantly 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 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 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 a 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 seem to
have occurred through a remarkable tearing apart of both of these primordial
artistic drives. And this event
corresponded to 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. By doing that, even the
most recent present moment had to appear to them at once sub species 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 the greed of the moment. And a people (as well as a person, by
the way) is only worth as much as 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. It is
customary for a decisive secularization, a breach with the unconscious
metaphysics of its earlier existence, with all the ethical consequences, to be
tied in with this process. 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 the wildness of
thought, custom, and action.
But now this metaphysical drive still tries to
create, even in a toned down form, a transfiguration for itself, in the
Socratism of science which pushes toward 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. For all
that, the Hellene still sat in the middle this pile with an unquenched heart,
until he understood to mask that fever, like Graeculus, with Greek cheerfulness
and Greek negligence 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 dissatisfied 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 a lifeless
numbed turning away—with everything sub specie saeculi [under the eye of the
secular age], 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
transplanting a foreign myth would enjoy any lasting success, without
irreparably damaging the tree in the transplant. Perhaps it is at some point strong and
healthy enough to slice out this foreign element with a fearful struggle, but
usually it must proliferate its diseased condition, sick and faded.
We have such a high regard for the pure and
powerful core of the German being that it is precisely there we dare to expect
from it that elimination of powerfully planted 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 this spirit would have start its struggle with the elimination of the
Romantic But at that point he has
to remember an external preparation and encouragement in the victorious courage
and bloody glory of the recent war but search for the inner necessity 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.
24
Among the
characteristic artistic effects of musical tragedy we had to stress an
Apollonian illusion through which we are supposedly rescued from immediate unity
of being with the Dionysian music, while our musical excitement can discharge
itself in an Apollonian sphere, in a visible middle world which interposed
itself. By doing this we though we
had noticed how, through this discharge, that this 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. Hence, it was here,
where the Apollonian is energized and raised aloft, as it were, through the
spirit of the music, we had to recognize the highest intensification of its
power and, therefore, in the fraternal bond of Apollo and Dionysus the highest
point of both Apollonian and Dionysian artistic aims.
Of course,
the projected Apollonian image with this inner illumination through music does
not achieve the effect characteristic of the weaker degrees of Apollonian
art—what epic or animated stone are 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
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 that penetrating light
illuminating everything held the eye in its spell and held it from penetrating
any more deeply.
Anyone who
has not had the 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 this co-existence may be the most
remarkable.
If we now
translate this phenomenon going on 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 dissonant, in so many countless forms, is
presented with such fondness, always renewed—and precisely in the richest and
youngest age of a people? Do we not
perceive in all this a higher pleasure?
For the fact
that in life things are really so tragic would at 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. And the tragic myth,
in so far 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! Tis is the hour hand on the clock of
your existence!”
And does the
myth show us this life in order to transfigure it for us? If not, in what does the aesthetic joy
consist with which we also allow these 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 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, in which I
repeat an earlier sentence—that existence and the world appear justified only as
an aesthetic phenomenon. It’s 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’s
a direct way to make this ur-phenomenon of Dionysian art, 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, 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,
shouldn’t 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 precisely 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 to 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 or deprivation of one of them will be linked to a decline in the
other, if a weakening of myth in general manifests itself in a weakening of the
Dionysian capability.
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 mere 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 are
indications that in spite of everything the German spirit rests and dreams in
magnificent health, its 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 for ever its mythic homeland, when it still understands so
clearly the voice 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.
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 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 some human development of dissonance—and what is a
man other than that?—then this
dissonance, in order to capable of life, would need a marvelous 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 in general worth living and
push us to experience the next moment.
But in this
process, from that basis for all existence, 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. Where Dionysian power rises up as
impetuously as we are seeing it rise, there Apollo must already have come down
to us, hidden in a cloud. The next
generation may well see the richest his beautiful effects.
However, the
fact that this effect is necessary each man will experience most surely through
his intuition, if he once, even 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 sounding lutes 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, how much must these
people 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.”
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