An earthly consonance + World Book
Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: Interlude II. Nietzsche - part 8
From The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche...
Sec 17 - The Decline of music after Euripides
I don’t know why Nietzsche and Kaufmann thought the book should end with section 15, this is great stuff.
Dionysian art, too, wishes to convince us of the eternal joy of existence: only we are to seek this joy not in phenomena, but behind them. We are to recognize that all that comes from being must be ready for a sorrowful end; we are forced to look into the terrors of the individual existence -- yet we are not to become rigid with fear: a metaphysical comfort tears us momentarily from the bustle of the changing figures. We are really for a brief moment primordial being itself, feeling its raging desire for existence and joy in existence; the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena, now appear necessary to us, in view of the excess of countless forms of existence which force and push one another into life, in view of the exuberant fertility of the universal will. We are pierced by the maddening sting of these pains just when we have become, as it were, one with the infinite primordial joy in existence, and when we anticipate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility and eternity of this joy. In spite of fear and pity, we are the happy living beings, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose creative joy we are united...
He could be writing about a transcendent connection with Devi here. I’m very surprised. Does he ever talk about Cosmogony? One can also imagine what Foucault would have seen in this.
With respect to Greek tragedy... the lack of congruity between myth and expression might easily lead us to regard it as shallower and less significant than it really is... for how easily one forgets that what the word-poet did not succeed in doing, namely, attain the highest spiritualization and ideality of the myth, he might very well succeed in doing every moment as creative musician! ...
...If ancient tragedy was diverted from its course by the dialectical desire for knowledge and the optimism of science, this fact might lead us to believe that there is an eternal conflict between the theoretic and the tragic world view; and only after the spirit of science has been pursued to its limits, and its claims to universal validity destroyed by the evidence of these limits may we hope for a rebirth of tragedy... In this contrast, I understand by the spirit of science the faith that first came to light in the person of Socrates -- the faith in the explicability of nature and in knowledge as a panacea...
But what if the spirit of science leads to a Cosmic Music? What if the two world views were to merge?
In another direction also we see at work the power of this un-Dionysian myth-opposing spirit, when we turn our attention to the prevalence of character representation and psychological refinement in tragedy from Sophocles onward. The character must no longer be expanded into an eternal type, but on the contrary, must develop individually through artistic subordinate traits and shadings, through the nicest precision of all lines, in such a manner that the spectator is in general no longer conscious of the myth, but of the vigorous truth to nature and the artist’s imitative power. Here also we observe the victory of the phenomenon over the universal, and the delight in a unique, almost anatomical preparation; we are already in the atmosphere of a theoretical world, where scientific knowledge is valued more highly than the artistic reflection of a universal law.
...The new spirit [Euripides and after], therefore, sought for an earthly resolution of the tragic dissonance. The hero, after being sufficiently tortured by fate, earned a well-deserved reward through a splendid marriage or tokens of divine favor... The deus ex machina took the place of metaphysical comfort...
The noblest manifestation of that other form of ‘Greek cheerfulness,’ the Alexandrian, is the cheerfulness of the theoretical man... it combats Dionysian wisdom and art, it seeks to dissolve myth, it substitutes for a metaphysical comfort an earthly consonance, in fact, a deus ex machina of its own, the [Faustian] god of machines and crucibles, that is, the powers of the spirits of nature recognized and employed in the service of a higher egoism; it believes it can correct the world by knowledge, guide life by science, and actually confine the individual within a limited sphere of solvable problems, from which he can cheerfully say to life: ‘I desire you; you are worth knowing.’
Now that is Settembrini in a nutshell.
World Book.
It occurred to me today that for all this talk of books and libraries, I’ve never mentioned the largest single work in my possession -- which is also the one I’ve owned the longest and is as well bound as any book in my collection. I mean my collection of The World Book Encyclopedia, in nineteen volumes, purchased, volume by volume, at our local Red Owl supermarket in 1961. (There are also two paper bound "Annuals" for the years 1959 and 1960 which brought it up to date.)
It remains a decent reference work for many things, but today it’s chief virtue is it’s functionality as a time machine. For example: Detroit, Mich., according to my World Book is the nation’s fifth largest city with a population of 1,849,568. “Detroit ranks third among the cities of the United States as an industrial center... “
“In the present day one out of every three persons living in Metropolitan Detroit is employed by the automobile industry...”
Today the population of the city of Detroit is 681,090 and it ranks 18th in the nation. Auto industry employment has dropped over 100% with 95% of the remaining jobs in the Metro area outside the city of Detroit.
And then there’s Phoenix, Ariz.: population 106,818. “It lies in the center of the Salt River Valley, and is surrounded by vast cotton fields. The city is a shipping center for citrus fruits, farm produce, and beef cattle. Canneries, food-packing plants, and a flour mill are located here.” Phoenix gets a total of two paragraphs with no pictures at all while Detroit gets two and a half pages including an entire page of photos.
Today Phoenix rates sixth in population with 1,445,632 in the city proper, while agriculture is no longer mentioned as a key economic sector.
For the curious, neither Scottsdale nor Tempe even get an entry.
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