Interlude XXIII. Nietzsche - part 12

Parable of the porcupines

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XXII. Nietzsche - part 11

From The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche...

Sec 22 -

...He [the attentive “friend”] beholds the transfigured world of the stage and nevertheless denies it. He sees the tragic hero before him in epic clearness and beauty, and nevertheless rejoices in his annihilation. He comprehends the action deep down, and yet likes to flee into the incomprehensible. He feels the actions of the hero to be justified, and is nevertheless still more elated when these actions annihilate their agent. He shudders at the sufferings which befall the hero, and yet anticipates in them a higher, much more overpowering joy. He sees more extensively and profoundly than ever, and yet wishes he were blind.

Again this is so Japanese and so consonant with the death wish aspect of Schubert that Mann was mining in The Magic Mountain. Plus the sublime aspect of suffering resonates with some of Naphtha’s positions..

How must we derive this curious internal bifurcation, this blunting of the Apollinian point, if not from the Dionysian magic that, though apparently exciting the Apollinian emotions to their highest pitch, still retains the power to force into its service his excess of Apollinian force?

The tragic myth is to be understood only as a symbolization of the Dionysian wisdom through Apollinian artifices. The myth leads the world of phenomena to its limits where it denies itself and seeks to flee back again into the warmth of the true and only reality, where it then seems to commence its metaphysical swansong...  [I’m skipping the Isolde reference here.]

[Talking about the problem for the dramatic artist of performing for an audience of “critics” -- of people educated to view art dispassionately,] ...Confronted with such a public, the nobler natures among the artists counted upon exciting their moral-religious emotions, and the appeal to the moral world-order intervened vicariously where some powerful artistic magic ought to enrapture the genuine listener. Or some more imposing, or at all events exciting, trend of the contemporary political and social world was so vividly presented by the dramatist that the listener could forget his critical exhaustion and abandon himself to emotions similar to those felt in patriotic or warlike moments, or before the tribune of parliament, or at the condemnation of crime and vice -- an alienation from the true aims of art that sometimes had to result in an outright cult of tendentiousness... The attempt, for example, to use the theater as an institution for the moral education of the people, still taken seriously in Schiller’s time, is already reckoned among the incredible antiques of a dated type of education. While the critic got the upper hand in the theater and concert hall, the journalist in the schools, and the press in society, art degenerated into a particularly lowly topic of conversation, and aesthetic criticism was used as a means of uniting a vain, distracted, selfish, and moreover piteously unoriginal sociability whose character is suggested by Schopenhauer’s parable of the porcupines. As a result art has never been so much talked about and so little esteemed....

I adore Schopenhauer’s parable of the porcupines so I’m going to quote it in full: On a cold day, a group of porcupines huddled together closely to save themselves by their mutual warmth from freezing. But soon felt the mutual quills and drew apart. Whenever the need for warmth brought them closer together again, this second evil was repeated, so that they were tossed back and forth between these two kinds of suffering until they discovered a moderate distance that proved most tolerable -- Thus the need for company, born of the emptiness and monotony inside them, drives men together; but their many revolting qualities and intolerable faults repel them again. The medium distance that they finally discover and that makes association possible is politeness and good manners. Whoever does not keep this distance is told, among the British: keep your distance! -- To be sure, this only permits imperfect satisfaction of the need for mutual warmth, but it also keeps one from feeling the prick of the quills -- But whoever possesses much inner warmth of his own will prefer to avoid company lest he cause or suffer annoyance.

Henry Ryecroft would have been a porcupine with great "inner warmth."

Next: Interlude XXIV. Nietzsche - part 13.