Interlude XIX. Nietzsche - part 8

Socrates the theoretical man

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XVIII. Nietzsche - part 7

From The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche...

Sec 15 - The theoretical man

... it is enough to recognize in him [Socrates] a type of existence unheard of before him: the type of the theoretical man whose significance and aim it is our next task to try to understand. Like the artist, the theoretical man finds an infinite delight in whatever exists, and this satisfaction protects him against the practical ethics of pessimism... the theoretical man... finds the highest object of his pleasure in the process of an ever happy uncovering that succeeds through his own efforts.

...there is... a profound illusion that first saw the light of the world in the person of Socrates: the unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of logic, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being but even of correcting it. This sublime metaphysical illusion accompanies science as an instinct and leads science again and again to its limits at which it must turn into art -- which is really the aim of this mechanism.

[The mission of science is] ... to make existence appear comprehensible and thus justified; and if reasons do not suffice, myth has to come to their aid in the end -- myth which I have just called the necessary consequence, indeed the purpose of science...

...Socrates is the prototype of the theoretical optimist who, with his faith that the nature of things can be fathomed, ascribes to knowledge and insight the power of a panacea, while understanding error as the evil par excellence...

But science, spurred by its powerful illusion, speeds irresistibly toward its limits where its optimism, concealed in the essence of logic, suffers shipwreck... When they see to their horror how logic coils up at these boundaries and finally bites its own tail -- suddenly the new form of insight breaks through, tragic insight which, merely to be endured, needs art as a protection and remedy...

"Bites its own tail" sounds like Nietzsche's mature voice sneaking through in this his first book. In general, The Birth of Tragedy does not read like the confident (all too confident, at times) Nietzsche of his later books.

While I was thinking I only needed to read the first 15 sections of The Birth of Tragedy, since both Nietzsche and Kaufmann (the translator) agree that's where the book should end, I have now decided I need to read the rest since it has to do with contemporary (for Nietzsche) German art and music -- and also because Thomas Mann may have held a different view. To contradict my previous notion of studying history backward (because it is so hard to remember that things or concepts we take for granted didn’t necessarily exist in the past. “Nationalism” as it is currently understood, was invented by Hegel around 1800, for example. So that studying the past becomes a process of subtraction), I have to admit that reading Nietzsche requires a familiarity with Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and especially Schopenhauer. Nietzsche includes a two page quote from Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in section 16 that is pretty great... though Schopenhauer usually tends to make me nod off. This passage, in particular, goes well with my quote from Dr. Kaku (Interlude XIV. ) about “cosmic music”, ...“We might, therefore, just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will; and this is the reason why music makes every painting, and indeed every scene of real life and of the world, at once appear with higher significance, certainly all the more, in proportion as its melody is analogous to the inner spirit of the given phenomenon...”

Sec 16 - Schopenhauer

[Quoted from Schopenhauer,] ...All possible efforts, excitements, and manifestations of will, all that goes on in the heart of man and that reason includes in the wide, negative concept of feeling, may be expressed by the infinite number of possible melodies, but always in the universal, in the mere form, without the material, always to the thing-in-itself, not the phenomenon, the inmost soul, as it were, of the phenomenon without the body. This deep relation which music has to the true nature of all things also explains the fact that suitable music played to any scene, action, event, or surrounding seems to disclose to us its most secret meaning, and appears as the most accurate and distinct commentary upon it... music is distinguished from all the other arts by the fact that it is not a copy of the phenomenon... but an immediate copy of the will itself, and therefore complements everything physical in the world and every phenomenon by representing what is metaphysical, the thing in itself... [to repeat] We might, therefore, just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will; and this is the reason why music makes every painting, and indeed every scene of real life and of the world, at once appear with higher significance, certainly all the more, in proportion as its melody is analogous to the inner spirit of the given phenomenon... For melodies are to a certain extent, like general concepts, an abstraction from the actual. This actual world, then, the world of particular things, affords the object of perception, the special and individual, the particular case, both to the universality of the concepts and to the universality of the melodies. But these two universalities are in a certain respect opposed to each other; for the concepts contain particulars only as the first forms abstracted from perception, as it were, the separated shell of things, thus they are, strictly speaking , abstracta: music, on the other hand, gives the inmost kernel which precedes all forms, or the heart of things... ...when the composer has been able to express in the universal language of music the stirrings of will which constitute the heart of an event, then the melody of the song... is expressive, But the analogy discovered by the composer between the two must have proceeded from the direct knowledge of the nature of the world unknown to his reason, and must not be an imitation produced with conscious intention by means of concepts, otherwise the music does not express the inner nature, the will itself, but merely gives an inadequate imitation of its phenomenon...

(Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille und Verstellung) Schopenhauer seems not to have cared much for paragraphs.

[Back to Nietzsche] ...it is only through the spirit of music that we can understand the joy involved in the annihilation of the individual. For it is only in particular examples of such annihilation that we see clearly the eternal phenomenon of Dionysian art, which gives expression to the will in its omnipotence... the eternal life beyond phenomena, and despite annihilation. The metaphysical joy in the tragic is a translation of the instinctive unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the language of images: the hero, the highest manifestation of the will, is negated for our pleasure, because he is only phenomenon, and because the eternal life of the will is not affected by his annihilation... Plastic art has an altogether different aim: here Apollo overcomes the suffering of the individual by the radiant glorification of the eternity of the phenomenon: here beauty triumphs over the suffering inherent in life; pain is obliterated by lies from the features of nature. In Dionysian art and its tragic symbolism the same nature cries to us with its true, undissembled voice: 'Be as I am! Amid the ceaseless flux of phenomena I am the eternally creative primordial mother, eternally impelling to existence, eternally finding satisfaction in this change of phenomena!'

This works well with the significance Muriel Barbery gave to music in The Elegance of the Hedgehog. On the other hand, music, as a path to the Dionysian, would seem to subvert Foucault's insistence that madness is the only access we have to the world of unreason.

From The Elegance of the Hedgehog, this is Paloma talking about a choir performance at her school:

...Everyday life vanishes into song, you are suddenly overcome with a feeling of brotherhood, of deep solidarity, even love, and it diffuses the ugliness of everyday life into a spirit of perfect communion. Even the singer's faces are transformed: it's no longer Achille Grand-Fernet that I'm looking at (he is a very fine tenor), or Deborah Lemeur or Segolene Rachet or Charles Saint-Sauveur. I see human beings, surrendering to music.

Every time, it's the same thing, I feel like crying, my throat goes all tight and I do the best I can to control myself but sometimes it gets close: I can hardly keep myself from sobbing. So when they sing a canon I look down at the ground because it's just too much emotion at once: it's too beautiful, and everyone singing together, this marvelous sharing. I'm no longer myself, I am just one part of a sublime whole, to which the others also belong, and I always wonder at such moments why this cannot be the rule of everyday life, instead of being an exceptional moment, during a choir...

Next: Interlude XX. Nietzsche - part 9.