Music... the real idea of the world
Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: Interlude XXI. Nietzsche - part 10
From The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche...
Sec 20 - Rebirth of tragedy (Sec 19 was about opera...)
...If heroes like Goethe and Schiller could not succeed in breaking open the enchanted gate which leads into the Hellenic magic mountain... what could the epigones of such heroes hope for -- unless, amid the mystic tones of reawakening tragic music, the gate should open for them suddenly of its own accord....
Let no one try to blight our faith in a yet-impending rebirth of Hellenic antiquity; for this alone gives us hope for a rebirth and purification of the German spirit through the fire magic of music....
Yes, my friends, believe with me in Dionysian life and the rebirth of tragedy. The age of the Socratic man is over... Only dare to be tragic men; for you are to be redeemed....
This, once again, sounds like the voice of the true Nietzsche.
Sec 21 - Music and Tragedy
[Speaking again of the Greeks,] ...It is the people of the tragic mysteries that fights the battles against the Persians; and the people that fought these wars in turn needs tragedy as a necessary potion to recover... After all, one feels in every case in which the Dionysian liberation from the fetters of the individual finds expression first of all in a diminution of, in indifference to, indeed, in hostility to, the political instincts. Just as certainly, Apollo who forms states is also the genius of the principium individuationis, and state and patriotism cannot live without an affirmation of the individual personality. [National Socialism would contradict this, I think, or rather, would see in National Socialism a middle ground perhaps] But from orgies a people can take one path only, the path to Indian Buddhism, and in order that this may be endurable at all with its yearning for the nothing, it requires these rare ecstatic states with their elevation above space, time, and the individual. These states in turn demand a philosophy that teaches men how to overcome by the force of an idea the indescribable displeasure of the states that lie between. Where the political drives are taken to be absolutely valid, it is just as necessary that a people should go the path toward the most extreme secularization whose most magnificent but also most terrifying expression may be found in the Roman imperium.
...But let us ask by means of what remedy it was possible for the Greeks during their greatest period, in spite of the extraordinary strength of their Dionysian and political instincts, not to exhaust themselves either in ecstatic brooding or in a consuming chase after worldly power and worldly honor, but rather to attain that splendid mixture which resembles a noble wine in making one feel fiery and contemplative at the same time. Here we must clearly think of the tremendous power that stimulated, purified, and discharged the whole life of the people: tragedy....
First, it’s impossible to generalize about the Hellenes as they were so different. I assume he is primarily talking about the Athenians but it wasn’t the Athenians alone who fought the Persians. Second, Athenian values were well mixed with greed and the usual failings of mankind. The democracy of Athens intrigues us because it is such a true mirror of our own vices.
Tragedy absorbs the highest ecstasies of music, so that it truly brings music, both among the Greeks and among us, to its perfection; but then it places the tragic myth and the tragic hero next to it, and he, like a powerful Titan, takes the whole Dionysian world upon his back and thus relieves us of this burden. [The Promethean/Christ thing again] On the other hand, by means of the same tragic myth, in the person of the tragic hero, it knows how to redeem us from the greedy thirst for this existence, and with an admonishing gesture it reminds us of another existence and a higher pleasure for which the struggling hero prepares himself by means of his destruction, not by means of his triumphs. [Now the Japanese are on board. Also, this does work with National Socialism, personal transcendence through sacrifice for the nation. And nothing could be more anti-bourgeois.] Between the universal validity of its music and the listener, receptive in his Dionysian state, tragedy places a sublime parable, the myth, and deceives the listener into feeling that the music is merely the highest means to bring life into the vivid world of myth. Relying on this noble deception, it may now move its limbs in dithyrambic dances and yield unhesitatingly to an ecstatic feeling of freedom in which it could not dare to wallow as pure music without this deception. The myth protects us against the music, while on the other hand it alone gives music the highest freedom. In return, music imparts to the tragic myth an intense and convincing metaphysical significance that word and image without this singular help could never have attained. And above all, it is through music that the tragic spectator is overcome by an assured premonition of a highest pleasure attained through destruction and negation, so he feels as if the innermost abyss of things spoke to him perceptibly...
That not only would be of interest to the Japanese and National Socialists but it is starting to make me think of Schubert’s Winterreise which brings us back to Hans Castorp and The Magic Mountain.
Suppose a human being has thus put his ear, as it were, to the heart chamber of the world will [by listening to the third act of Tristan and Isolde] and felt the roaring desire for existence pouring from there into all the veins of the world, as a thundering current or as the gentlest brook, dissolving into a mist -- how could he fail to break suddenly? How could he endure to perceive the echo of innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe in the ‘wide space of the world night,’ enclosed in the wretched glass capsule of the human individual, [sounds a bit like Goethe's Homunculus] without inexorably fleeing toward his primordial home, as he hears this shepherd's dance of metaphysics? But if such a work could nevertheless be perceived as a whole, without denial of individual existence; if such a creation could be created without smashing its creator -- whence do we take the solution of such a contradiction?
I’d like to skip over some of this but it seems I really can’t.
Here the tragic myth and the tragic hero intervene between our highest musical emotion and this music -- at bottom only as symbols of the most universal facts, of which only music can speak so directly. [I keep thinking back to the Cosmic Music of String Theory] But if our feelings were those of entirely Dionysian beings, myth as a symbol would remain totally ineffective and unnoticed, and would never for a moment keep us from listening to the re-echo of the universalia ante rem...” [I’m also getting insight on the Medieval virtue, as well as necessity, of copying manuscripts as I type this out. No better way to really learn them. A passage about how Apollinian factors distance us from the Dionysian reality,] ”And where, breathless, we once thought we were being extinguished in a convulsive distention of all our feelings, and little remained to tie us to our present existence, we now hear and see only the hero wounded to death, yet not yet dying, with his despairing cry: ‘Longing! Longing! In death still longing! for very longing not dying!’ ...However powerfully pity affects us, it nevertheless saves us in a way from the primordial suffering of the world, just as the symbolic image of the myth saves us from the immediate perception of the highest world idea, [So the Apollinian is what keeps us from really seeing Annie Dillard’s “Lights in the Tree.” Yes that is a bit of a stretch,] just as thought and word save us from the uninhibited effusion of the unconscious will. The glorious Apollinian illusion makes it appear as if even the tone world confronted us as a sculptural world....
Thus the Apollinian tears us out of the Dionysian universality and lets us find delight in individuals; it attaches our pity to them, and by means of them it satisfies our sense of beauty which longs for great and sublime forms; it presents images of life to us, and incites us to comprehend in thought the core of life they contain. With the immense impact of the image, the concept, the ethical teaching, and the sympathetic emotion, the Apollinian tears man from his orgiastic self-annihilation and blinds him to the universality of the Dionysian process, deluding him into the belief that he is seeing a single image of the world... and that, through music, he is merely supposed to see it still better and more profoundly. What can the healing magic of Apollo not accomplish when it can even create the illusion that the Dionysian is really in the service of the Apollinian and capable of enhancing its effects -- as if music were essentially the art of presenting an Apollinian content?
...music is the real idea of the world, drama is but the reflection of this idea, a single silhouette of it... Even if we agitate and enliven the figure [character] in the most visible manner, and illuminate it from within, it still remains merely a phenomenon from which no bridge leads us to true reality, into the heart of the world. But music speaks out of this heart; and though countless phenomena of the kind were to accompany this music, they could never exhaust its essence, but would always be nothing more than its externalized copies.
...In the total effect of tragedy, the Dionysian predominates once again. Tragedy closes with a sound which could never come from the realm of Apollinian art. And thus Apollinian illusion reveals itself as what it really is -- the veiling during the performance of the tragedy of the real Dionysian effect; but the latter is so powerful that it ends by forcing the Apollinian drama itself into a sphere where it begins to speak with Dionysian wisdom and even denies itself and its Apollinian visibility. Thus the intricate relation of the Apollinian and the Dionysian in tragedy may really be symbolized by a fraternal union of the two deities: Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; and Apollo, finally the language of Dionysus; and so the highest goal of tragedy and of all art is attained.
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