Chapter 28 seventeen

Dionysian art must also convince us of the eternal joy of existence, but we should seek this joy not in the appearance, but behind it.We should realize that everything that exists must be prepared for an extremely painful decline, and we are forced to face up to the horror of individual existence—but after all, there is no need to be paralyzed by fear. A kind of metaphysical comfort allows us to temporarily escape the disturbance of the world's changes.For a brief moment we really become the primordial creature itself, feeling its irresistible desire to live and its joy in living.We now feel that, since there is such a surplus of innumerable life-forms competing for existence, and the world-will is so prolific, struggle, suffering, and the destruction of phenomena are inevitable.Just as we seem to be one with the primordial ecstasy of existence, just as we expect this joy to last in Dionysian ecstasy, at the same moment we are stabbed by the sharp thorn of pain.Despite our fears and our pity, we are the fortunate living beings, not as individuals but as one, to whose reproductive joy we are bound.

Now, the history of Greek tragedy tells us very clearly that Greek tragic works of art were indeed born from the spirit of music.With this thought, we believe, the original meaning of the chorus, which is so startling, appears plausible for the first time.At the same time, however, we must admit that the Greek poets, not to mention the Greek philosophers, never clearly grasped the meaning of the tragic myth mentioned above.The protagonists of the Greek poets, whose words seem more superficial than their deeds, the myth is not at all commensurately reflected in what they say.The structure of the plot and the intuitive image show a deeper wisdom than the poet himself can grasp with his lines and concepts.The same can be seen in Shakespeare, for example, in a similar sense that his Hamlet speaks more superficially than he acts, so that the insight I have mentioned above cannot be understood from the lines but only through a deep intuition and a general view of the play. That Hamlet lesson.As for Greek tragedy, we now of course only have scripts, and I even pointed out that the inconsistency between myth and lines easily misleads us into thinking it is shallower and duller than it is, and therefore assumes that its effects are greater than the ancients believed. The superficiality of the statement.Because we easily forget that the highest spiritual and idealized state of myth is beyond the reach of the poet with words, but he, as the musician of creation, can do it at any time!We must, of course, reconstruct the dominance of the musical effect through deep scholarship, in order to feel a little of that incomparable consolation inherent in true tragedy.But unless we are Greeks, we can experience this musical advantage just as we are.On the contrary, even Greek music in its heyday, much richer than the modern music we enjoy hearing, sounds to us like songs sung with sheepish confidence by young musical prodigies.Greeks are forever children, as the Egyptian priests said.They are also children in the tragic art, and do not know what a noble toy they make and destroy with their own hands.

The spirit of music pursues the embodiment of images and myths. From the earliest lyric poems to the Attic tragedy, this pursuit has been continuously strengthened, and it has just reached a climax, and then it is suddenly interrupted, and it seems to disappear from the surface of Greek art.Yet the Dionysian world-view that arose from this pursuit survived in the Mystery, and, though transformed, still appealed to serious natures.Will it one day rise again as art from its mysterious abyss? Here we have to clarify a question: Is the opposition to which tragedy dies strong enough in any age to prevent the artistic revival of tragedy and the tragic worldview?If the ancient tragedy has been squeezed out of its orbit by the dialectical impulse of knowledge and of scientific optimism, it follows from this fact that there is a perpetual struggle between the theoretical and tragic worldviews.Only when the scientific spirit has been led to its limits, by which its presumed universal validity has been proved bankrupt, can hope for a rebirth of tragedy.We symbolize this tragic cultural form by the musical Socrates in the sense agreed earlier.On the contrary, I understand the scientific spirit as the belief in the inquirability of nature and the universal benefit of knowledge that first appeared in the personality of Socrates.

We have only to think of the immediate consequences of this rushing forward scientific spirit, and we see at once, as if with our own eyes, how mythology is destroyed by it, and how poetry is exiled from its ideal homeland and has no home to return to by virtue of mythology.As long as we believe that music should have the ability to reproduce myth from itself, then we will find that the scientific spirit is on the road against music's ability to create myth.This can be seen in the development of the new cantata of Attica, whose music no longer expresses inner essence and will, but merely imitates through the medium of concepts, an unqualified representation of phenomena.The true musical nature is as disgusted with this spoiled music as Socrates' tendency to destroy art.Aristophanes' reliable intuition did indeed make sense, and he shared an aversion to Socrates himself, to the tragedies of Euripides, and to the neo-canonical poets, finding in all three the hallmarks of a decaying culture .In a profane way, this new ode turns music into a mimetic portrait of a phenomenon, such as a battle, a storm on the ocean, and thus, of course, completely deprives music of its ability to create myth.If music only compels us to look for a superficial resemblance between an event in life and nature and a certain rhythmic pattern or a particular sound of music in an attempt to arouse our pleasure, if our intellect must be content to recognize this similarities, then, we fall into a state of mind that cannot feel the myth.For the myth is intended as an individual instance, so that the universality and the truth towards the infinite can be intuitively felt.True Dionysian music places before us such a universal mirror of the will of the world, in which every event of intuition is refracted, and we feel it expand at once into a reflection of eternal truth.On the contrary, when this intuitive event enters the sound-picture of the new carol, it immediately loses any mythological quality, and the music becomes a poor copy of the phenomenon, and thus far poorer than the phenomenon itself.Because of this poverty, it also devalues ​​the phenomenon itself in our senses, so that now, for example, a battle so musically imitated is limited to the noise of marches, the sound of bugles, etc., and our imagination is ostracized. Chained to these shallow things.The sound-picture is thus in every way opposed to the myth-creating power of true music, which impoverishes phenomena than they really are; Dionysian music, however, enriches individual phenomena and expands them into world-images.The great triumph of the non-Dionysian spirit, which alienates music from itself through the development of the new canticle, reduces music to the slavery of phenomena.In a higher sense, Euripides should be said to have a thoroughly unmusical quality, and it is for this reason that he is an ardent follower of the new ode music, employing with the generosity of a robber all its drama. effects and methods.

We see another aspect of the practical force of this non-Dionysian spirit against mythology if we note that, since Sophocles, there has been an increase in characterization and psychological characterization in tragedy.Character should no longer be expanded into a timeless type, but should, on the contrary, be worked individually through artificial detail and tonal rendering, through which all lines are exposed, so that the audience generally does not feel myth, but a high degree of verisimilitude and artistry. imitation ability.Here, too, we find the triumph of phenomena over generality, the predilection for almost individual anatomical specimens, and we have breathed into a theoretical world in which scientific understanding takes precedence over artistic reflection of the laws of the world.The movement to portray character progressed rapidly: Sophocles was still portraying complete characters, and using mythology to make them subtly displayed; In the new comedy, there is only one mask of expression, and the reckless old man, the cheated pimp, and the cunning house slave are repeated endlessly.Where is the spirit of music creating myths now?The music that remains today is either music of excitement or music of memory, that is to say, either a stimulant to the tired and benumbed nerves, or a sound-picture.As for the former, it has almost nothing to do with the accompanying lyrics.In Euripides, when his protagonists or chorus began to sing, things went on quite frivolously; how much more could his unscrupulous successors take it?

However, it is the ending of the new play that expresses the new non-Dionysian spirit to the fullest.In old tragedies there is always that metaphysical consolation with which the ending can be felt, without which the joy of tragedy cannot be explained at all.In Oedipus at Colonus, perhaps the purest echoes of reconciliation from beyond.Now that the creative spirit of music has disappeared from tragedy, tragedy is, strictly speaking, dead, for where else can one draw that metaphysical solace now?Therefore, people seek the secular solution to the tragic conflict. After the protagonist suffers from fate, he is finally reunited or favored, and gets good rewards.The tragic hero turned into a gladiator occasionally grants him freedom after he has been devastated and bruised. Deus ex machina (mechanic deus) replaced metaphysical consolation.I don't want to say that the Dionysian world view was completely shattered by the non-Dionysian spirits who rushed in.All we know is that it must have escaped from the realm of art, into the underworld, as it were, and degenerated into mystic worship.However, on the surface of the vast area of ​​the Greek nation, the miasma of non-dionysian spirit pervades and appears in the form of "Greek optimism". As mentioned earlier, this optimism is an aging desire for survival that is no longer productive.It is opposed to the beautiful "simplicity" of the ancient Greeks. According to the existing characteristics, the latter should be understood as the flower of Apollonian culture growing from the dark abyss. The Triumph of Painful Wisdom.The noblest form of the other "Greek euphoria," that of Alexander, is that of the theoretician, which exhibits the features I have just deduced from the non-Dionysian spirit: it opposes Dionysian wisdom and art; Myth; it replaces metaphysical consolation by a secular conciliation, even by a special mechanical deity, the god of organs and furnaces, that is, spiritual forces of nature known and employed in the service of high egoism; Its belief that knowledge can transform the world, that science can guide life, actually lures the individual into the narrowest range of solvable tasks, in which he says to life with glee: "I want you, you are worth acquainting." .”