Interlude XXVI. Foucault - part 6

The Heart Laid Bare

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XXV. Nietzsche - part 14

From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...

p 62

[In the early 1950s] ... he [Foucault] returned to the Hopital Sainte-Anne, one of the biggest and most modern psychiatric facilities in France [where he had been confined during his suicidal phase], this time to do research... “I had a very strange status there,” Foucault later recalled. “Nobody worried about what I should be doing; I was free to do anything. I was actually in a position between the staff and the patients.” The ambiguity of his position, one imagines, was also heightened by his own recent brushes with madness. “I had been mad enough to study reason,” he later quipped: “I was reasonable enough to study madness...” “I felt very close to and not very different from the inmates...”

For the moment I’m going to ignore the Waiting For Godot stuff on page 65.

Chapter 3 - The Heart Laid Bare

p 67

...In the preface he published to Madness and Civilization in 1961, Foucault summarized his projected lifework in terms that suggest the profundity of Nietzsche’s impact on him in these formative years. His goal, he declared elliptically, would be “to confront the dialectics of history with the unchanging structure of the tragic.” This would require a multifaceted “inquiry,” into madness of course, but also, in future books, into dreams and into “sexual prohibitions” and “the happy world of desire.” But he would conduct all of these inquiries, he stressed, “sous le soleil de la grande recherche nietzscheene” -- under the sun of the great Nietzschean quest.

A cryptic phrase, an enigmatic epiphany. For what did Foucault mean by “the great Nietzschean quest”? And why did Nietzsche, and specifically the Nietzsche of the Untimely Meditations, suddenly speak to him so powerfully... in 1953?

... The four essays collected in the Untimely Meditations were composed between 1873 and 1876, after the frosty reception accorded to Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy. [It appears I was set-up by Mr. Miller. The previous section reminded me of that book because he was leading up to it in his own book. I’m going to let him repeat some of what I’ve already said.] In this work, originally published in 1872... [Nietzsche] had propounded a bold new theory of tragedy. “The unchanging structure of the tragic,” according to Nietzsche, pitted two timeless drives against each other: the Apollonian [Miller prefers this spelling to "Apollinian and so does my spellchecker] propensity to shape the world with forms of just and pleasing proportions; and the Dionysian tendency to shatter such forms and violently transgress the boundaries between the conscious and unconscious, reason and unreason... [the book was not received well in Nietzsche’s academic circles] “It is the free man’s task to live for himself, without regard for others,” he wrote in one of his notebooks from this period...

p68

The essays in the Untimely Meditations all express in various ways Nietzsche’s effort to find his own purpose, his own “higher necessity.” The Untimely Meditations, he later explained, offer “a vision of my future,... my innermost history, my becoming.” Above all, it was the essay that he called “Schopenhauer as Educator” that illuminated the inner logic of what became Nietzsche’s own lifelong quest -- to understand, as the famous subtitle of Ecce Homo puts it, “how one becomes what one is.”

Now I’m a little nervous about commenting on something Miller may be getting ready to cover himself, but... The weakest parts of The Birth of Tragedy, the parts Nietzsche most regretted fifteen years later, were the parts that were most influenced by Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer's philosophy essentially played the role for Nietzsche that Marxism was playing for Foucault -- burdening him with ready ideas that were not his own and were, in fact, at variance with his own ideas. Also, Schopenhauer is almost as deadening to read as Heidegger, though it’s slightly easier to parse his meaning.

The first sentences of “Schopenhauer as Educator” lay out Nietzsche’s central theme with compact eloquence: “A traveler who had visited many countries and people and several continents, was asked what trait he had discovered to be common to all men, and replied: a tendency to laziness. Some will think that he might have answered more accurately and truthfully: They are all afraid. They hide behind custom and opinions. Basically, every man knows quite well that, being unique, he is on this earth only once, and that no accident, however unusual, could ever again combine this wonderful diversity into the unity he is. He knows this, but hides it like a bad conscience. ”

p69

...Throughout most of his life, Nietzsche, like Foucault, rejected the idea that the self is something merely given. In the eyes of both men, “truth,” including the “truth” about one’s self, “is not something there, that might be found or discovered -- but something that must be created. ” “Our body is but a social structure. ” as Nietzsche once put it -- and our self is but the contingent and changing product of a shifting deployment of cultural and corporeal forces.

...A creature of history, every human being embodies a compound of nature and culture, chaos and order, instinct and reason -- two heterogeneous dimensions of being human symbolized, as Nietzsche saw it, by Dionysus and Apollo.

p70

...To tap the primal essence of our animal nature was, for Nietzsche, to grasp anew the mysterious capacity of “transcendence,” and to exercise what he called the “will to power. ”

...Born and raised in a tradition, a human being at first may experience its cultural inheritance as a cozy haven of custom and habit. But each person’s cozy routines turn out, on closer inspection, to be a singularly haphazard concatenation of “fragment and riddle and dreadful accident, ” hidden beneath a comforting veneer of “borrowed manners and received opinion. ” Sorting through the manners and opinions, and the desires and appetites, that any culture implants in every soul -- and trying to imagine transforming them -- is, in effect, the challenge every truly creative human being must resolve.

“Nobody can build you the bridge over which you must cross the river of life, nobody but you alone, ” Nietzsche - writes in “Schopenhauer as Educator”. “True, there are countless paths and bridges and demigods that would like to carry you across the river, but only at the price of your self, you would pledge your self, and lose it. In this world there is one unique path which no one but you may walk. Where does it lead? Do not ask, take it. ”

Next: Interlude XXVII. Foucault - part 7.

Interlude XXV. Nietzsche - part 14 - The End & Snow

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XXIV. Nietzsche - part 13

From The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche...

Sec 25 - The end - Snow?

...If we could imagine dissonance become man -- and what else is man? -- this dissonance, to be able to live, would need a splendid illusion that would cover dissonance with a veil of beauty. This is the true artistic aim of Apollo in whose name we comprehend all those countless illusions of the beauty of mere appearance that at every moment make life worth living at all and prompt the desire to live on in order to experience the next moment.

Of this foundation of all existence -- the Dionysian basic ground of the world -- not one whit more may enter the consciousness of the human individual than can be overcome again by this Apollinian power of transfiguration. Thus these two art drives must unfold their powers in a strict proportion, according to the law of eternal justice. Where the Dionysian powers rise up as impetuously as we experience them now [1871], Apollo, too, must already have descended among us, wrapped in a cloud; and the next generation will probably behold his most ample beautiful effects.

Time to recall Hans Castorp's dream in “Snow” from The Magic Mountain....

That this effect should be necessary, everybody should be able to feel most assuredly by means of intuition, provided he has ever felt, if only in a dream, that he was carried back into an ancient Greek existence. Walking under lofty Ionic colonnades, looking up towards a horizon that was cut off by pure and noble lines, finding reflections of his transfigured shape in the shining marble at his side, and all around him solemnly striding or delicately moving human beings, speaking with harmonious voices and in a rhythmic language of gestures -- in view of this continual influx of beauty, would he not have to exclaim, raising his hand to Apollo: ‘Blessed people of Hellas! How great must Dionysus be among you if the god of Delos considers such magic necessary to heal your dithyrambic madness!’

To a man in such a mood, however, an old Athenian, looking up at him with the sublime eyes of Aeschylus, might reply: ‘But say this, too, curious stranger: how much did this people have to suffer to be able to become so beautiful! But now follow me to witness a tragedy, and sacrifice with me in the temple of both deities!’

My "First time."

Have I told this story before in this blog? I don’t think so.  I first read The Birth of Tragedy for a class in college in the early 1970s. The professor was the “Kant man” at my university and Nietzsche was new to him (how this was possible I don’t know). At the beginning of each class Herr Doktor Professor would remove his jacket and hang it on a chair back, remove his watch and place in on the table, and he would then proceed to lecture while pacing back and forth across the small room in the basement of the Nursing College (the Philosophy department was the Cinderella of the Liberal Arts college) physically touching each wall. Literally bouncing off the walls in his enthusiasm.

We started with The Birth of Tragedy and then went through several of the other, especially meaty, books in Nietzsche’s oeuvre. Our professor’s enthusiasm was infectious and the class was a delight though, needless to say, challenging. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche is a follower of Schopenhauer, but he soon grows out of that pessimism. He is also, ultimately, a knife in the heart of Kant. There came a day during our class when our professor finally realized that he could go with Nietzsche or stay with Kant. After that, he lectured standing at the table with his watch on. It was one of my most memorable lessons in college.

Next: Interlude XXVI. Foucault - part 6.

Interlude XXIV. Nietzsche - part 13

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?

Next: Interlude XXV. Nietzsche - part 14.

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.

Interlude XXII. Nietzsche - part 11

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.

Next: Interlude XXIII. Nietzsche - part 12.