Chapter 20 Nine

In the Apollonian part of Greek tragedy, in the dialogue, everything on the surface appears simple, transparent, and beautiful.In this sense, the dialogue is a portrait of the Greeks.Their nature is also revealed in dance, for in dancing the greatest strength, though only latent, is revealed through the flexibility and richness of movement.The language of the heroes of Sophocles so surprises us with its Apollonian certainty and clarity that we feel at once a glimpse of their deepest essence, and wonder at the path leading to it. The road is so short.However, once we see that the hero's apparent and visibly changing character is nothing but light and shadow cast on a dark wall, that is, a phenomenon through and through, and nothing else, we prefer to inquire into the myth itself reflected on this bright mirror. , then we suddenly experience a phenomenon that is just the opposite of the well-known optical phenomenon.If we force ourselves to look directly at the sun and then look away because it's too bright, a dull, therapeutic patch of color appears in front of our eyes.On the contrary, the light-shadow phenomenon of the Sophoclean hero, in short, the Apollinian phenomenon of makeup, is the necessary product of a glimpse of the mystery and horror of nature, like the flash to heal the eye blinded by the night of terror. spot.Only in this sense can we be confident that we have correctly understood the serious and important concept of "Greek Lotte."Otherwise, we would of course mistake the security and comfort we see everywhere today for this optimism.

The most tragic figure on the Greek stage, the unfortunate Oedipus, is a noble man in Sophocles.Though wise, he was doomed to error and disaster, but at last through his ordeal he wrought around himself a mystical blessing of power which survived his death.The deep poet wants to tell us that this noble man did not sin.Every law, every natural order, even the moral world, was destroyed by his act, through which a higher and mystical sphere of influence arose, which founded a new world on the basis of the overthrown old one. above the ruins.This is what the poet wants to tell us, because he is also a religious thinker.As a poet, he first points out to us the knot of an intricate process which the enforcer gradually unties, link by link, leading to his own destruction.So great is the genuinely Greek delight in this dialectical solution that an air of wise optimism permeates the whole play, alleviating at every turn the dreaded foreboding of the process.In "Oedipus at Colonus" we have just this kind of euphoria, only infinitely mythologized.The old man suffered a terrible disaster, and he endured the humiliation like a miserable man. Before him, a supernatural joy descended from the world of gods, telling us: the hero in his purely passive attitude has reached the highest activity beyond his life. And the conscious efforts and pursuits of his early career only led him into negativity.The knots of the Oedipus allegory, inextricably entangled in the eyes of mortals, are here gradually untied—and in this divine dialectical development the deepest human joy suddenly descends upon us.If our explanation is in line with the original intention of the poet, we can still ask after all: Has the connotation of this myth been exhausted?It is evident that the whole vision of the poet is that light and shadow that appears to us as a natural cure after a glimpse of the abyss.Oedipus, the murderer of the patricide, the adulterer of the mother, the solver of the riddle of the Sphinx!What does this mysterious triple doom tell us?There is an ancient, especially Persian, folk belief that a wise wizard can only be born of incest.Considering the riddle-solving and mother-marrying Oedipus, we can at once illustrate the above belief in this way: wherever the boundaries between present and future, the rigid laws of individuation, and in general the inherent magic of nature are subdued by the magical power of prophecy, There must have been a very unnatural phenomenon—such as the incest mentioned here—as the original event.For how can nature be compelled to reveal its secrets without successfully resisting nature, that is, by unnatural means?I have seen this truth from the terrible triple doom of Oedipus, who solved the riddle of the sphinx of the double nature of nature, who must also break the most sacred law as parricide and mother-adulter. natural order.Indeed, this myth seems to whisper to us: Wisdom, especially Dionysian wisdom, is an evil against nature. Whoever uses knowledge to push nature into the abyss of destruction will suffer the disintegration of nature. "The sharp edge of wisdom in turn stings the wise; wisdom is a crime against nature" - this myth shouts to us such terrible words.But the Greek poets shone like a ray of sunlight on the majestic Manon column of this myth, and suddenly it began to sing--to the melody of Sophocles!

I now contrast the glories of passivity with the glory of positivity that shone around Prometheus of Aeschylus.What the thinker Aeschylus wants to tell us in the play, as a poet, he only lets us guess from his metaphorical image; but the young Goethe reveals to us in his Prometheus rhetoric: The man who rose to be a Titan won his own civilization by fighting and forced the gods to ally with him, because he grasped the existence and boundaries of the gods with his unique wisdom.This Promethean hymn is, at its basic idea, a true celebration of blasphemy, yet its most astonishing aspect is Aeschylus' profound sense of justice: on the one hand the immeasurable suffering of the brave "individual," On the other hand, the predicament of the gods, the premonition of the end of the gods, and the power of these two painful worlds to promote reconciliation and achieve metaphysical unity-all these are the most powerful reminders of the core and purpose of Aeschylus' worldview. He believes that Fate is the eternal justice that governs both gods and men.The audacity of Aeschylus to weigh the world of Olympus on the scales of his justice makes it clear to us that the profound Greeks had in their mysteries an unbreakable foundation of metaphysical thought, and that they All the skepticism would burst out against Olympus.Greek artists, especially, experienced a secret feeling of interdependence when thinking of these gods.It is in Prometheus of Aeschylus that this feeling finds symbolic expression.The Titan artist harbored a firm belief that he could create man, or at least destroy the gods of Olympus.This was done by his high intelligence, for which he had to suffer forever to atone.For this majestic "can" of a great genius, it is completely worth paying the price of eternal suffering, the artist's lofty pride-this is the connotation and soul of Aeschylus' drama poetry.Sophocles, on the contrary, plays the prelude to the triumph of the saint on his Oedipus.However, with the drama poem of Aeschylus, it is still impossible to detect the unfathomable horror of the myth itself.The joy of the artist's birth, the joy of artistic creation against all disasters, is rather just a brilliant cloud and sky illusion reflected in the dark sea of ​​suffering.The legend of Prometheus was the original property of the whole Aryan race, and is a proof of their talent for melancholy and tragic subjects.Of course it cannot be ruled out that this myth has just as much character-defining value for the Aryans as the myth of the Fall of Man has for the Semites, and that there is a kind of fraternity between the two myths. kinship.The premise of the Prometheus myth is the naive human overvaluation of fire as the true patron saint of every emerging culture.However, man wants to control fire freely, instead of relying on gifts from the sky such as burning lightning and scorching sun to make fire. In the eyes of those quiet primitive people, this is nothing more than a kind of blasphemy and a plunder of the sacred nature.The first philosophical problem thus sets up an embarrassing and unsolvable contradiction between man and God, and pushes it like a boulder to the door of every culture.All that is bestowed upon man must be attained through a kind of profanity, and henceforth reap the fruit again, and the offended Heaven will send down a flood of misery and sorrow upon the nobly striving upward generation of mankind.This heavy thought dignifies profanity, and thus stands in strange contrast to the Semitic myth of the Fall of Man, in which curiosity, deceit, seduction, sensuality, in a word, a series of mainly female passions, are regarded as Root of all evil.The Aryan conception is characterized by the lofty notion of active crime as the true Promethean virtue.At the same time, it finds the ethical justification of pessimistic tragedy in justifying human misery, both its sin and the suffering it entails.The misfortune in the nature of things,—which the deep Aryan has no desire to justify,—the conflict in the world-soul, appears to him as a confusion of different worlds, such as the world of the gods and the world of men, each of which acts as an individual It is reasonable to look at it, but as a single world that coexists with each other, it suffers for their individuation.When the individual longs to be part of the Allgemeine, when he tries to break free from the limits of individuation and become the only world-being himself, he experiences firsthand the primordial conflict hidden in things, that is to say, he desecrates and suffers. up.Thus the Aryans regarded profanity as masculine, and the Semites as feminine, just as original profanity was committed by men, and original sin by women.Again, the witches' chorus sang:

Whoever understands that the innermost core of the Prometheus legend lies in the need to reveal profanity to the Titanic struggling individual must at the same time feel the non-Apollinian nature of this pessimistic conception.Because Apollo's way of appeasing individuals is to draw a boundary between them, asking people to know themselves and moderation, and reminding people that this boundary is a sacred world law.But in order that the form, in this Apollonian inclination, should not be solidified into Egyptian rigidity and indifference, and that the whole sea should not die still in its effort to delineate the course and extent of the single wave, the torrent of the Dionysian passion is always renewed. Break down all the little dams by which the Apollonian "will" tries to unilaterally restrain the Greek world.Then the sudden surge of Bacchus carried the individual monolithic tidal wave, as Prometheus' brother, Atlas of the Titans, carried the earth.This Titanic impulse is the common denominator between the Promethean and Dionysian spirits, as if to become the Atlas of all individuals, to lift them higher and higher and farther away on its gigantic back.In this sense, Aeschylus' Prometheus is a mask of Dionysus, but in terms of the above-mentioned profound sense of justice, Aeschylus reveals that he comes from the Apollonian incarnation and the boundary of justice. god, paternal origin of the wise.The dual personality of Aeschylus' Prometheus, his Dionysian and Apollonian natures, can perhaps be expressed in an abstract formula: "Everything that exists is rational and irrational at the same time. equal rights.”

This is your world!This is called the world! ——