Preaching to the Aryans & Dissonance
Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: Interlude XXIII. Nietzsche - part 12
From The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche...
Sec 23 - Preaching to the Aryans
...without myth every culture loses the healthy natural power of its creativity; only a horizon defined my myths completes and unifies a whole cultural movement. Myth alone saves all the powers of the imagination and of the Apollinian dream from their aimless wanderings. The images of the myth have to be the unnoticed omnipresent demonic guardians, under whose care the young soul grows to maturity and whose signs help the man to interpret his life and struggles....
By way of comparison let us now picture the abstract man, untutored by myth; abstract education; abstract morality; abstract law; the abstract state; let us imagine the lawless roving of the artistic imagination, unchecked by any native myth; let us think of a culture that has no fixed and sacred primordial site but is doomed to exhaust all possibilities and to nourish itself wretchedly on all other cultures -- there we have the present age, the result of that Socratism which is bent on the destruction of myth. And now the mythless man stands eternally hungry, surrounded by all past ages, and digs and grubs for roots, even if he has to dig for them among the remotest antiquities. The tremendous historical need of our unsatisfied modern culture, the assembling around one of countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge -- what does all this point to, if not the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical maternal womb? Let us ask ourselves whether the feverish and uncanny excitement of this culture is anything but the greedy seizing and snatching at food of a hungry man -- and who would care to contribute anything to a culture that cannot be satisfied no matter how much it devours, and at whose contact the most vigorous and wholesome nourishment is changed into ‘history and criticism’?
...all our hopes stretch out longingly toward the perception that beneath this restless palpitating cultural life and convulsion there is concealed a glorious, intrinsically healthy, primordial power that, to be sure, stirs vigorously only at intervals in stupendous moments, and then continues to dream of a future awakening.... [“Tomorrow belongs to me”]
...And any people -- just as, incidentally, also any individual -- is worth only as much as it is able to press upon its experiences the stamp of the eternal; for thus it is, as it were, desecularized and shows its unconscious inward convictions of the relativity of time and of the true, that is metaphysical, significance of life...
Since the reawakening of Alexandrian-Roman antiquity in the fifteenth century we have approximated this state in the most evident manner, after a long interlude that is difficult to describe. On the heights we encounter the same overabundant lust for knowledge, the same unsatisfied delight in discovery, the same tremendous secularization, and beside it a homeless roving, a greedy crowding around foreign tables, a frivolous deification of the present, or a duly dazed retreat -- everything sub specie saeculi [Latin for "under the aspect of eternity"], of the ‘present age....
We think so highly of the pure and vigorous core of the German character that we dare to expect of it above all others this elimination of the forcibly implanted foreign elements, and consider it possible that the German spirit will return to itself. Some may suppose that this spirit must begin its fight with the elimination of everything Romantic. If so they may recognize an external preparation and encouragement in the victorious fortitude and bloody glory of the last [Franco-Prussian] war... But let him never believe that he could fight similar fights without the gods of his house, or his mythical home, without ‘bringing back’ all German things! And if the German should hesitantly look around for a leader who might bring him back again into his long lost home whose ways and paths he scarcely knows anymore, let him merely listen to the ecstatic luring call of the Dionysian bird that hovers above him and wants to point the way for him.
It would be helpful to know the age of the author when he wrote a particular passage, and maybe even where he was when he wrote it. Nietzsche was in his late 20s when he wrote this. One should be able to right-click on a passage and get this info along with a variety of analysis. And illustrations where appropriate. Says the man who doesn’t own an e-reader.
Sec 24 - Dissonance & the disharmonic
...With the Apollinian art sphere he [the tragic artist] shares the complete pleasure in mere appearance and in seeing, yet at the same time he negates this pleasure and finds a still higher satisfaction in the destruction of the visible world of mere appearance.
The content of the tragic myth is, first of all, an epic event and the glorification of the fighting hero. But what is the origin of this enigmatic trait that the suffering and fate of the hero, the most painful triumphs, the most agonizing oppositions of motives, in short, the exemplification of this wisdom of Silenus, or, to put it aesthetically, that which is ugly and disharmonic, is represented ever anew in such countless forms and with such a distinct preference -- and precisely in the fruitful and youthful period of a people? Surely a higher pleasure must be perceived in all this.
...The tragic myth, too, insofar as it belongs to art at all, participates fully in this metaphysical intention of art to transfigure. But what does it transfigure when it presents the world of appearance in the image of the suffering hero? Least of all the ‘reality’ of this world of appearance, for it says to us: ‘Look there! Look closely! This is your life, this is the hand on the clock of your existence.’
And the myth should show us this life in order to thus transfigure it for us? But if not, in what then lies the aesthetic pleasure with which we let these images, too, pass before us? I ask about the aesthetic pleasure, though I know full well that many of these images also produce at times a moral delight, for example under the form of pity or moral triumph. But those who would derive the effect of the tragic solely from these moral sources -- which, to be sure, has been the custom in aesthetics all too long -- should least of all believe that they have thus accomplished something for art, which above all must demand purity in its sphere... How can the ugly and the disharmonic, the content of the tragic myth, stimulate aesthetic pleasure?
Here it becomes necessary to take a bold running start and leap into a metaphysics of art... In this sense, it is precisely the tragic myth that has to convince us that even the ugly and disharmonic are part of an artistic game that the will in the eternal amplitude of its pleasure plays with itself. But this primordial phenomenon of Dionysian art is difficult to grasp, and there is only one direct way to make it intelligible and grasp it immediately: through the wonderful significance of musical dissonance. Quite generally, only music, placed beside the world, can give us an idea of what is meant by the justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. The joy aroused by the tragic myth has the same origin as the joyous sensation of dissonance in music. [Hedgehog, again] The Dionysian, with its primordial joy experienced even in pain, is the common source of music and tragic myth.
...For we now understand what it means to wish to see tragedy and at the same time to long to get beyond all seeing: referring to the artistically employed dissonances, we should have to characterize the corresponding state by saying that we desire to hear and at the same time long to get beyond all hearing. That the striving for the infinite, the wing-beat of longing that accompanies the highest delight in clearly perceived reality, reminds us that in both states we must recognize a Dionysian phenomenon: again and again it reveals to us the playful construction and destruction of the individual world as the overflow of a primordial delight...
...Let no one believe that the German spirit has forever lost its mythical home... Some day it will find itself awake in all the morning freshness following a tremendous sleep: then it will slay dragons, destroy vicious dwarfs, [Christian priests?] wake Brunnhilde -- and even Wotan’s spear will not be able to stop its course!
What are the metaphysical implications of racial myths? How can the primordial be so nationalistic. How can you reject the romantic and embrace the nationalistic?
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