(Originally written July 4, 2007 in Book 15)
The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche
Section 13
Through Socrates and Euripides the Greek culture placed greater emphasis on enlightenment and knowledge.
Socrates found that the 'wisest' of all Greeks really know nothing and only operated by instinct.
Socrates is the anti-mystic. Rather than relying on instinctive wisdom as the mystic does he uses consciousness to develop a hyper logical system.
The dying Socrates replaced all the old hero of Greece and became the image to which every young Grecian strived for.
Section 14
Socrates and his followers despised tragedy, but found solace and joy in the fables of Aesop.
"Poems are useful: they can tell the truth by means of parable to those who are not very bright" (Nietzsche, 90).
Socrates saw that tragedy did not tell the truth and that it was aimed at those who were not very bright. For these reasons it is doubly contemptible.
Plato also held tragedy in contempt, but his own artistic impulses necessitated him to create an art that was borne of the old ones.
Plato saw art as an imitation of a shadow and thus lower than even the contemptible empirical world.
Plato's dialogues blended narrative, lyric, drama, prose and poetry. He broke the strict law of uniformity of linguistics and created a whole new genre of art.
Plato's dialogues served as the savior of old poetry and the template for the novel.
The Apollonian tendency withdrew to logical schematism and the Dionysian transformed into Naturalism.
The optimistic maxims of
1) Virtue is knowledge
2) Man sins only from ignorance
3) The virtuous man is happy man served to fully kill tragedy.
Optimism destroys the essence of tragedy.
Though harsh against art in life at death Socrates obeyed the divine call to music asking, "Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science" (Nietzsche, 93).
Section 15
The Socratic way of life which exists today prompts a constant regeneration of art. The infinite of Socrates guarantees the infinity of art.
Socrates, to be recognized as truthful, must be viewed as the "theoretical man whose significance and aim it is our task to try and understand" (Nietzsche, 94).
The artist clings to the mystery while the theoretical man clings to what was once mystery and is non-known.
Lessing [who is Lessing?] is the most honest theoretical man because he announced that he cared more for the search for truth then for truth itself.
With Socrates, a profound illusion was born. This illusion holds that through unshakeable through using causality one can penetrate the deepest abyss of being and can furthermore correct the errors in being.
This metaphysical illusion accompanies science as an instinct and leads science time and time again to its limits where it must transform into art.
Socrates was the first man to live and die by the instinct of science. The dying Socrates is admired because he has absolved all fear of death through knowledge and reason.
Socrates stands as the turning point of history.
Pessimism in a practical sense will take over wherever art does not appear, especially as religion or science.
Socrates is the anti-pessimist. His optimistic faith that nature is intelligible and that sin is error, which is correctible denies pessimism a foothold.
Science needs art to protect it from its own boundaries. At the boundaries of science man becomes pessimistic if not reminded by art.
Section 16
There is a dichotomy between an insatiable lust for optimistic knowledge and the tragic need for art.
Apollo is the genius of the principium individuationis in which redemption through illusion is truly obtained. Dionysus is the mystical union in which the Apollonian principle is broken. It is from these two sources in which all art is born.
We may regard nature and music as two different expressions of the same thing.
Music is a universal language. It resembles geometrical figures and numbers as a definitive universalism. Music as a universal language is experienced a priori.
Music is not a copy of the physical world, but a copy of the will itself. As such, it stands in relation to the world as the will stands in relation to the world.
The world is embodied music as the world is embodied will.
Music, according to Schopenhauer, is the immediate language of the will.
Image and concept attain a higher significance under the influence of a truly corresponding music.
Music incites to the symbolic intuition of Dionysian Universality and music allows the symbolic image to emerge in its highest significance.
Music gives birth to the myth, most importantly the tragic myth: "the myth which expresses Dionysian knowledge in symbols" (Nietzsche, 103).
It is only through music that individuals can understand the joy of the annihilation of the individual.
Apollonian art triumphs the joys of this life by overshadowing suffering with beauty. Dionysian art overcomes the suffering of this life through the belief in the eternal life of the unified will.
Section 17
Dionysian art seeks to convince of us of the eternal joy of existence. But as Apollonian art does this through phenomena, Dionysian art seeks this from behind phenomena.
Myth was annihilated by the faith in science. Music is the way for myth to be reborn.
Aristophanes saw Socrates, Euripides and the music of the New Dithyrambic poets which mirrored phenomena, not the will itself, as enemies and destroyers of art.
By setting music to be descriptive of phenomena, music has been robbed of its power to create myth.
Music which merely represents phenomena is wretchedly poorer than the phenomena itself.
In Euripides, we see the triumph of scientific knowledge and the demise of artistic reflection. The phenomenal particulars win out over the universals.
Tragedy revealed a metaphysical comfort through music. But with music stripped of its myth-bearing power there is no metaphysical comfort and knowledge leaves us rawer than before we knew. There is no solace in science apart from art.
The new spirit of Greek art, deprived of myth, was to seek comfort in an earthly, phenomenal dissolution of tragedy. The hated deus ex machina replaced the metaphysical comfort.
The Dionysian spirit having been banished from the stage fled into the degenerate form of cult.
With the deus ex machina the Dionysian spirit was driven underground and individualism heralded the deus ex machina as the true comfort.
Metaphysical, universal comfort was lost and replaced by momentary particular comforts.
Section 18
There are three cultures:
1. Socratic (Alexandrian)
2. Hellenic (Artistic)
3. Tragic (Buddhistic)
The Alexandrian culture idolizes the theoretical man, reason, knowledge and science above all else.
The Socratic culture is delusional optimistic in believing that it possesses limitless power.
Myth is the necessary prerequisite of religion.
The tragic (Buddhistic) culture replaces science with wisdom at its highest end.
The Socratic culture will tremble with fear once its optimism has been shattered by learning of its power limitations.
Section 19
The Socratic culture is the culture of the opera.
The Socratic culture endures the music of opera to hear the words. All the while he trembles at the thought of giving the music too much appreciation and undoing the base of his culture.
The art of the opera responds to a powerful need, but it is a non-aesthetic need. It responds to the need for faith in the existence of the artistic and good man.
The origin of opera is the fulfillment of a non-aesthetic need: the glorification of man. It stands contra to the dogma of the inherently corrupt and lost man.
Opera is a birthing of the theoretical man, not the artist. The non-musical heroes of Opera demand t hat words are nobler than the tones as the soul is nobler than the body.
The opera is a crude unmusical combination of image, music and words.
"The premise of the opera is a false belief concerning the artistic process: the idyllic belief that every sentient man is an artist" (Nietzsche, 117).
The cultured Renaissance man let himself be led back to the primitive artistic man by imitation of Greek tragedy.
The opera does not touch sorrow as art ought to, but rather emphasizes the cheery optimism of eternal rediscovery.
Those who seek to destroy the unmusical opera would have to destroy the whole of the Socratic culture.
Art in the Socratic culture is empty because it is void of its true purpose: "to save the eye from gazing into the horrors of night and to deliver the subject by the healing balm of illusion from the spasms of the agitation of the will" (Nietzsche, 118).
Music is powerless when it is alienated from its true dignity as the Dionysian mirror of the world and as an expression of the will itself.
Music cannot be a slave to the phenomena or be a mere imitation of the formal characteristics of phenomena.
The Socratic culture cannot explain nor tolerate the reemergence of the Dionysian spirit which has taken place in music from Bach to Beethoven to Wagner.
The Dionysian spirit of this German music is the sole purifying fire in the Alexandrian culture of knowledge lust.
"All that we now call culture, education, civilization must some day appear before the unerring judge, Dionysus" (Nietzsche, 120).
Kant and Schopenhauer made it possible for the spirit of German philosophy to destroy Socratic scientific optimism.
The oneness of German music and philosophy points to the emergence of a Hellenic society. The Alexandrian age seems to be receding backwards to the Dawn of a new tragic age.
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