set down as the properly _metaphysical_ activity of man; in the
book itself the piquant proposition recurs time and again, that the
existence of the world is _justified_ only as an æsthetic phenomenon.
Indeed, the entire book recognises only an artist-thought and
artist-after-thought behind all occurrences,--a "God," if you will,
but certainly only an altogether thoughtless and unmoral artist-God,
who, in construction as in destruction, in good as in evil, desires
to become conscious of his own equable joy and sovereign glory; who,
in creating worlds, frees himself from the _anguish_ of fullness
and _overfullness,_ from the _suffering_ of the contradictions
concentrated within him. The world, that is, the redemption of God
_attained_ at every moment, as the perpetually changing, perpetually
new vision of the most suffering, most antithetical, most contradictory
being, who contrives to redeem himself only in _appearance:_ this
entire artist-metaphysics, call it arbitrary, idle, fantastic, if
you will,--the point is, that it already betrays a spirit, which is
determined some day, at all hazards, to make a stand against the
_moral_ interpretation and significance of life. Here, perhaps for the
first time, a pessimism "Beyond Good and Evil" announces itself, here
that "perverseness of disposition" obtains expression and formulation,
against which Schopenhauer never grew tired of hurling beforehand his
angriest imprecations and thunderbolts,--a philosophy which dares to
put, derogatorily put, morality itself in the world of phenomena, and
not only among "phenomena" (in the sense of the idealistic _terminus
technicus_), but among the "illusions," as appearance, semblance,
error, interpretation, accommodation, art. Perhaps the depth of this
_antimoral_ tendency may be best estimated from the guarded and
hostile silence with which Christianity is treated throughout this
book,--Christianity, as being the most extravagant burlesque of the
moral theme to which mankind has hitherto been obliged to listen. In
fact, to the purely æsthetic world-interpretation and justification
taught in this book, there is no greater antithesis than the Christian
dogma, which is _only_ and will be only moral, and which, with
its absolute standards, for instance, its truthfulness of God,
relegates--that is, disowns, convicts, condemns--art, _all_ art, to
the realm of _falsehood._ Behind such a mode of thought and valuation,
which, if at all genuine, must be hostile to art, I always experienced
what was _hostile to life,_ the wrathful, vindictive counterwill to
life itself: for all life rests on appearance, art, illusion, optics,
necessity of perspective and error. From the very first Christianity
was, essentially and thoroughly, the nausea and surfeit of Life for
Life, which only disguised, concealed and decked itself out under the
belief in "another" or "better" life. The hatred of the "world," the
curse on the affections, the fear of beauty and sensuality, another
world, invented for the purpose of slandering this world the more,
at bottom a longing for. Nothingness, for the end, for rest, for the
"Sabbath of Sabbaths"--all this, as also the unconditional will of
Christianity to recognise _only_ moral values, has always appeared to
me as the most dangerous and ominous of all possible forms of a "will
to perish"; at the least, as the symptom of a most fatal disease, of
profoundest weariness, despondency, exhaustion, impoverishment of
life,--for before the tribunal of morality (especially Christian, that
is, unconditional morality) life _must_ constantly and inevitably be
the loser, because life _is_ something essentially unmoral,--indeed,
oppressed with the weight of contempt and the everlasting No, life
_must_ finally be regarded as unworthy of desire, as in itself
unworthy. Morality itself what?--may not morality be a "will to
disown life," a secret instinct for annihilation, a principle of
decay, of depreciation, of slander, a beginning of the end? And,
consequently, the danger of dangers?... It was _against_ morality,
therefore, that my instinct, as an intercessory-instinct for life,
turned in this questionable book, inventing for itself a fundamental
counter--dogma and counter-valuation of life, purely artistic, purely
_anti-Christian._ What should I call it? As a philologist and man of
words I baptised it, not without some liberty--for who could be sure
of the proper name of the Antichrist?--with the name of a Greek god: I
called it _Dionysian._
6.
You see which problem I ventured to touch upon in this early work?...
How I now regret, that I had not then the courage (or immodesty?) to
allow myself, in all respects, the use of an _individual language_
for such _individual_ contemplations and ventures in the field of
thought--that I laboured to express, in Kantian and Schopenhauerian
formulæ, strange and new valuations, which ran fundamentally counter
to the spirit of Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as to their taste!
What, forsooth, were Schopenhauer's views on tragedy? "What gives"--he
says in _Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,_ II. 495--"to all tragedy
that singular swing towards elevation, is the awakening of the
knowledge that the world, that life, cannot satisfy us thoroughly,
and consequently is _not worthy_ of our attachment In this consists
the tragic spirit: it therefore leads to _resignation_." Oh, how
differently Dionysos spoke to me! Oh how far from me then was just
this entire resignationism!--But there is something far worse in this
book, which I now regret even more than having obscured and spoiled
Dionysian anticipations with Schopenhauerian formulæ: to wit, that, in
general, I _spoiled_ the grand _Hellenic problem,_ as it had opened
up before me, by the admixture of the most modern things! That I
entertained hopes, where nothing was to be hoped for, where everything
pointed all-too-clearly to an approaching end! That, on the basis of
our latter-day German music, I began to fable about the "spirit of
Teutonism," as if it were on the point of discovering and returning
to itself,--ay, at the very time that the German spirit which not so
very long before had had the will to the lordship over Europe, the
strength to lead and govern Europe, testamentarily and conclusively
_resigned_ and, under the pompous pretence of empire-founding,
effected its transition to mediocritisation, democracy, and "modern
ideas." In very fact, I have since learned to regard this "spirit of
Teutonism" as something to be despaired of and unsparingly treated,
as also our present _German music,_ which is Romanticism through and
through and the most un-Grecian of all possible forms of art: and
moreover a first-rate nerve-destroyer, doubly dangerous for a people
given to drinking and revering the unclear as a virtue, namely, in
its twofold capacity of an intoxicating and stupefying narcotic. Of
course, apart from all precipitate hopes and faulty applications to
matters specially modern, with which I then spoiled my first book, the
great Dionysian note of interrogation, as set down therein, continues
standing on and on, even with reference to music: how must we conceive
of a music, which is no longer of Romantic origin, like the German; but
of _Dionysian_?...
7.
--But, my dear Sir, if _your_ book is not Romanticism, what in
the world is? Can the deep hatred of the present, of "reality"
and "modern ideas" be pushed farther than has been done in your
artist-metaphysics?--which would rather believe in Nothing, or in
the devil, than in the "Now"? Does not a radical bass of wrath and
annihilative pleasure growl on beneath all your contrapuntal vocal
art and aural seduction, a mad determination to oppose all that "now"
is, a will which is not so very far removed from practical nihilism
and which seems to say: "rather let nothing be true, than that _you_
should be in the right, than that _your_ truth should prevail!"
Hear, yourself, my dear Sir Pessimist and art-deifier, with ever
so unlocked ears, a single select passage of your own book, that
not ineloquent dragon-slayer passage, which may sound insidiously
rat-charming to young ears and hearts. What? is not that the true
blue romanticist-confession of 1830 under the mask of the pessimism
of 1850? After which, of course, the usual romanticist finale at once
strikes up,--rupture, collapse, return and prostration before an old
belief, before _the_ old God.... What? is not your pessimist book
itself a piece of anti-Hellenism and Romanticism, something "equally
intoxicating and befogging," a narcotic at all events, ay, a piece of
music, of _German_ music? But listen:
Let us imagine a rising generation with this undauntedness
of vision, with this heroic impulse towards the prodigious,
let us imagine the bold step of these dragon-slayers,
the proud daring with which they turn their backs on all
the effeminate doctrines of optimism, in order "to live
resolutely" in the Whole and in the Full: _would it not be
necessary_ for the tragic man of this culture, with his
self-discipline to earnestness and terror, to desire a new
art, _the art of metaphysical comfort,_ tragedy as the
Helena belonging to him, and that he should exclaim with
Faust:
"Und sollt ich nicht, sehnsüchtigster Gewalt,
In's Leben ziehn die einzigste Gestalt?"[1]
"Would it not be _necessary_?" ... No, thrice no! ye young
romanticists: it would _not_ be necessary! But it is very probable,
that things may _end_ thus, that _ye_ may end thus, namely "comforted,"
as it is written, in spite of all self-discipline to earnestness and
terror; metaphysically comforted, in short, as Romanticists are wont to
end, as _Christians...._ No! ye should first of all learn the art of
earthly comfort, ye should learn to _laugh,_ my young friends, if ye
are at all determined to remain pessimists: if so, you will perhaps,
as laughing ones, eventually send all metaphysical comfortism to the
devil--and metaphysics first of all! Or, to say it in the language of
that Dionysian ogre, called _Zarathustra_:
"Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher! And do
not forget your legs! Lift up also your legs, ye good
dancers--and better still if ye stand also on your heads!
"This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown--I
myself have put on this crown; I myself have consecrated my
laughter. No one else have I found to-day strong enough for
this.
"Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light one,
who beckoneth with his pinions, one ready for flight,
beckoning unto all birds, ready and prepared, a blissfully
light-spirited one:--
"Zarathustra the soothsayer, Zarathustra the sooth-laugher,
no impatient one, no absolute one, one who loveth leaps and
side-leaps: I myself have put on this crown!
"This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown--to
you my brethren do I cast this crown! Laughing have I
consecrated: ye higher men, _learn,_ I pray you--to laugh!"
_Thus spake Zarathustra_, lxxiii. 17, 18, and 20.
SILS-MARIA, OBERENGADIN, _August_ 1886.
[1]
And shall not I, by mightiest desire,
In living shape that sole fair form acquire?
SWANWICK, trans. of _Faust._
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY
FROM THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC
FOREWORD TO RICHARD WAGNER.
In order to keep at a distance all the possible scruples, excitements,
and misunderstandings to which the thoughts gathered in this essay
will give occasion, considering the peculiar character of our æsthetic
publicity, and to be able also to write the introductory remarks
with the same contemplative delight, the impress of which, as the
petrifaction of good and elevating hours, it bears on every page, I
form a conception of the moment when you, my highly honoured friend,
will receive this essay; how you, say after an evening walk in the
winter snow, will behold the unbound Prometheus on the title-page,
read my name, and be forthwith convinced that, whatever this essay may
contain, the author has something earnest and impressive to say, and,
moreover, that in all his meditations he communed with you as with one
present and could thus write only what befitted your presence. You
will thus remember that it was at the same time as your magnificent
dissertation on Beethoven originated, viz., amidst the horrors and
sublimities of the war which had just then broken out, that I collected
myself for these thoughts. But those persons would err, to whom this
collection suggests no more perhaps than the antithesis of patriotic
excitement and æsthetic revelry, of gallant earnestness and sportive
delight. Upon a real perusal of this essay, such readers will, rather
to their surprise, discover how earnest is the German problem we have
to deal with, which we properly place, as a vortex and turning-point,
in the very midst of German hopes. Perhaps, however, this same class
of readers will be shocked at seeing an æsthetic problem taken so
seriously, especially if they can recognise in art no more than a merry
diversion, a readily dispensable court-jester to the "earnestness
of existence": as if no one were aware of the real meaning of this
confrontation with the "earnestness of existence." These earnest ones
may be informed that I am convinced that art is the highest task and
the properly metaphysical activity of this life, as it is understood by
the man, to whom, as my sublime protagonist on this path, I would now
dedicate this essay.
BASEL, _end of the year_ 1871.
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
1.
We shall have gained much for the science of æsthetics, when once we
have perceived not only by logical inference, but by the immediate
certainty of intuition, that the continuous development of art is bound
up with the duplexity of the _Apollonian_ and the _Dionysian:_ in
like manner as procreation is dependent on the duality of the sexes,
involving perpetual conflicts with only periodically intervening
reconciliations. These names we borrow from the Greeks, who disclose
to the intelligent observer the profound mysteries of their view of
art, not indeed in concepts, but in the impressively clear figures of
their world of deities. It is in connection with Apollo and Dionysus,
the two art-deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there existed in
the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in origin and aims, between the
art of the shaper, the Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of music,
that of Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies run parallel
to each other, for the most part openly at variance, and continually
inciting each other to new and more powerful births, to perpetuate in
them the strife of this antithesis, which is but seemingly bridged over
by their mutual term "Art"; till at last, by a metaphysical miracle
of the Hellenic will, they appear paired with each other, and through
this pairing eventually generate the equally Dionysian and Apollonian
art-work of Attic tragedy.
In order to bring these two tendencies within closer range, let us
conceive them first of all as the separate art-worlds of _dreamland_
and _drunkenness;_ between which physiological phenomena a contrast
may be observed analogous to that existing between the Apollonian and
the Dionysian. In dreams, according to the conception of Lucretius,
the glorious divine figures first appeared to the souls of men, in
dreams the great shaper beheld the charming corporeal structure of
superhuman beings, and the Hellenic poet, if consulted on the mysteries
of poetic inspiration, would likewise have suggested dreams and would
have offered an explanation resembling that of Hans Sachs in the
Meistersingers:--
Mein Freund, das grad' ist Dichters Werk,
dass er sein Träumen deut' und merk'.
Glaubt mir, des Menschen wahrster Wahn
wird ihm im Traume aufgethan:
all' Dichtkunst und Poeterei
ist nichts als Wahrtraum-Deuterei.[1]
The beauteous appearance of the dream-worlds, in the production of
which every man is a perfect artist, is the presupposition of all
plastic art, and in fact, as we shall see, of an important half of
poetry also. We take delight in the immediate apprehension of form; all
forms speak to us; there is nothing indifferent, nothing superfluous.
But, together with the highest life of this dream-reality we also have,
glimmering through it, the sensation of its appearance: such at least
is my experience, as to the frequency, ay, normality of which I could
adduce many proofs, as also the sayings of the poets. Indeed, the man
of philosophic turn has a foreboding that underneath this reality in
which we live and have our being, another and altogether different
reality lies concealed, and that therefore it is also an appearance;
and Schopenhauer actually designates the gift of occasionally regarding
men and things as mere phantoms and dream-pictures as the criterion of
philosophical ability. Accordingly, the man susceptible to art stands
in the same relation to the reality of dreams as the philosopher to
the reality of existence; he is a close and willing observer, for from
these pictures he reads the meaning of life, and by these processes
he trains himself for life. And it is perhaps not only the agreeable
and friendly pictures that he realises in himself with such perfect
understanding: the earnest, the troubled, the dreary, the gloomy, the
sudden checks, the tricks of fortune, the uneasy presentiments, in
short, the whole "Divine Comedy" of life, and the Inferno, also pass
before him, not merely like pictures on the wall--for he too lives and
suffers in these scenes,--and yet not without that fleeting sensation
of appearance. And perhaps many a one will, like myself, recollect
having sometimes called out cheeringly and not without success amid the
dangers and terrors of dream-life: "It is a dream! I will dream on!" I
have likewise been told of persons capable of continuing the causality
of one and the same dream for three and even more successive nights:
all of which facts clearly testify that our innermost being, the common
substratum of all of us, experiences our dreams with deep joy and
cheerful acquiescence.
This cheerful acquiescence in the dream-experience has likewise been
embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo: for Apollo, as the god of
all shaping energies, is also the soothsaying god. He, who (as the
etymology of the name indicates) is the "shining one," the deity of
light, also rules over the fair appearance of the inner world of
fantasies. The higher truth, the perfection of these states in contrast
to the only partially intelligible everyday world, ay, the deep
consciousness of nature, healing and helping in sleep and dream, is at
the same time the symbolical analogue of the faculty of soothsaying
and, in general, of the arts, through which life is made possible and
worth living. But also that delicate line, which the dream-picture must
not overstep--lest it act pathologically (in which case appearance,
being reality pure and simple, would impose upon us)--must not be
wanting in the picture of Apollo: that measured limitation, that
freedom from the wilder emotions, that philosophical calmness of the
sculptor-god. His eye must be "sunlike," according to his origin; even
when it is angry and looks displeased, the sacredness of his beauteous
appearance is still there. And so we might apply to Apollo, in an
eccentric sense, what Schopenhauer says of the man wrapt in the veil
of Mâyâ[2]: _Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,_ I. p. 416: "Just as in
a stormy sea, unbounded in every direction, rising and falling with
howling mountainous waves, a sailor sits in a boat and trusts in his
frail barque: so in the midst of a world of sorrows the individual sits
quietly supported by and trusting in his _principium individuationis_."
Indeed, we might say of Apollo, that in him the unshaken faith in
this _principium_ and the quiet sitting of the man wrapt therein have
received their sublimest expression; and we might even designate Apollo
as the glorious divine image of the _principium individuationis,_
from out of the gestures and looks of which all the joy and wisdom of
"appearance," together with its beauty, speak to us.
In the same work Schopenhauer has described to us the stupendous _awe_
which seizes upon man, when of a sudden he is at a loss to account for
the cognitive forms of a phenomenon, in that the principle of reason,
in some one of its manifestations, seems to admit of an exception.
Add to this awe the blissful ecstasy which rises from the innermost
depths of man, ay, of nature, at this same collapse of the _principium
individuationis,_ and we shall gain an insight into the being of
the _Dionysian,_ which is brought within closest ken perhaps by the
analogy of _drunkenness._ It is either under the influence of the
narcotic draught, of which the hymns of all primitive men and peoples
tell us, or by the powerful approach of spring penetrating all nature
with joy, that those Dionysian emotions awake, in the augmentation of
which the subjective vanishes to complete self-forgetfulness. So also
in the German Middle Ages singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing
in number, were borne from place to place under this same Dionysian
power. In these St. John's and St. Vitus's dancers we again perceive
the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, with their previous history in Asia
Minor, as far back as Babylon and the orgiastic Sacæa. There are some,
who, from lack of experience or obtuseness, will turn away from such
phenomena as "folk-diseases" with a smile of contempt or pity prompted
by the consciousness of their own health: of course, the poor wretches
do not divine what a cadaverous-looking and ghastly aspect this very
"health" of theirs presents when the glowing life of the Dionysian
revellers rushes past them.
Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the covenant between man
and man again established, but also estranged, hostile or subjugated
nature again celebrates her reconciliation with her lost son, man. Of
her own accord earth proffers her gifts, and peacefully the beasts of
prey approach from the desert and the rocks. The chariot of Dionysus is
bedecked with flowers and garlands: panthers and tigers pass beneath
his yoke. Change Beethoven's "jubilee-song" into a painting, and, if
your imagination be equal to the occasion when the awestruck millions
sink into the dust, you will then be able to approach the Dionysian.
Now is the slave a free man, now all the stubborn, hostile barriers,
which necessity, caprice, or "shameless fashion" has set up between
man and man, are broken down. Now, at the evangel of cosmic harmony,
each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, blended with
his neighbour, but as one with him, as if the veil of Mâyâ has been
torn and were now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious
Primordial Unity. In song and in dance man exhibits himself as a member
of a higher community, has forgotten how to walk and speak, and is on
the point of taking a dancing flight into the air. His gestures bespeak
enchantment. Even as the animals now talk, and as the earth yields milk
and honey, so also something super-natural sounds forth from him: he
feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted and elated
even as the gods whom he saw walking about in his dreams. Man is no
longer an artist, he has become a work of art: the artistic power of
all nature here reveals itself in the tremors of drunkenness to the
highest gratification of the Primordial Unity. The noblest clay, the
costliest marble, namely man, is here kneaded and cut, and the chisel
strokes of the Dionysian world-artist are accompanied with the cry of
the Eleusinian mysteries: "Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen? Ahnest du den
Schöpfer, Welt?"[3]
[1]
My friend, just this is poet's task:
His dreams to read and to unmask.
Trust me, illusion's truths thrice sealed
In dream to man will be revealed.
All verse-craft and poetisation
Is but soothdream interpretation.
[2] Cf. _World and Will as Idea,_ 1. 455 ff., trans, by
Haldane and Kemp.
[3]
Ye bow in the dust, oh millions?
Thy maker, mortal, dost divine?
Cf. Schiller's "Hymn to Joy"; and Beethoven, Ninth Symphony.--TR.
2.
Thus far we have considered the Apollonian and his antithesis,
the Dionysian, as artistic powers, which burst forth from nature
herself, _without the mediation of the human artist,_ and in which
her art-impulses are satisfied in the most immediate and direct way:
first, as the pictorial world of dreams, the perfection of which
has no connection whatever with the intellectual height or artistic
culture of the unit man, and again, as drunken reality, which likewise
does not heed the unit man, but even seeks to destroy the individual
and redeem him by a mystic feeling of Oneness. Anent these immediate
art-states of nature every artist is either an "imitator," to wit,
either an Apollonian, an artist in dreams, or a Dionysian, an artist
in ecstasies, or finally--as for instance in Greek tragedy--an artist
in both dreams and ecstasies: so we may perhaps picture him, as in
his Dionysian drunkenness and mystical self-abnegation, lonesome and
apart from the revelling choruses, he sinks down, and how now, through
Apollonian dream-inspiration, his own state, _i.e._, his oneness
with the primal source of the universe, reveals itself to him _in a
symbolical dream-picture_.
After these general premisings and contrastings, let us now approach
the _Greeks_ in order to learn in what degree and to what height
these _art-impulses of nature_ were developed in them: whereby
we shall be enabled to understand and appreciate more deeply the
relation of the Greek artist to his archetypes, or, according to the
Aristotelian expression, "the imitation of nature." In spite of all the
dream-literature and the numerous dream-anecdotes of the Greeks, we can
speak only conjecturally, though with a fair degree of certainty, of
their _dreams._ Considering the incredibly precise and unerring plastic
power of their eyes, as also their manifest and sincere delight in
colours, we can hardly refrain (to the shame of every one born later)
from assuming for their very dreams a logical causality of lines and
contours, colours and groups, a sequence of scenes resembling their
best reliefs, the perfection of which would certainly justify us, if a
comparison were possible, in designating the dreaming Greeks as Homers
and Homer as a dreaming Greek: in a deeper sense than when modern man,
in respect to his dreams, ventures to compare himself with Shakespeare.