Chapter 33 twenty two

Careful friends may wish to use their own experience to imagine the effect of a pure and uncomplicated true musical tragedy.I would like to describe the phenomenon of this effect in two ways, so that he can now explain his own experience.He will recall how he felt elevated to a state of omniscience by the myth that was playing out before him, as if now his vision was no longer superficial but deep, as if with the help of music he had seen with his own eyes. The seething of the will, the struggle of the motives, the rising tide of the passions, as he sees lines and figures alive before his eyes, and is able to dive into the subtlest mysteries of the unconscious emotions.Just when he realized that his desire for image and brilliance was at its climax, he felt, after all, just as surely that this long series of Apollinian artistic effects did not produce blissful immersion in willless contemplation, like plastic artists and epic poems. The poet, that is, the true Apollonian artist, produces in him with his work; this state of mind can be described as the justification of the world of individuatio (individualization) achieved in willless contemplation, which is the culmination of Apollonian art. and miniatures.He admired the splendor of the stage world and denied it.He saw that the tragic hero in front of him had the clarity and beauty of the epic, but he was happy with the destruction of the hero.He understands the plot very well, but would rather escape into the incomprehensible.He felt that the hero's action was justified, but he was all the more invigorated by the fact that it had ruined the person involved.He shuddered at the suffering that the hero was about to encounter, but in it he had a premonition of a much higher and much more intense joy.He saw more and deeper than ever, and wished he was blind.Where shall we go for the origin of this strange splitting of the self, this collapse of the Apollonian summit, if not in Dionysian magic?Dionysian magic, which seems to stimulate the Apollonian impulse to its culmination, is able to compel this overflow of Apollonian power to its service.Tragic myths can only be understood as the visualization of Dionysian wisdom through Apollonian art.The tragic myth leads the phenomenal world to its limits, makes it deny itself, longs to flee again to the embrace of the only true reality, and then, like Isolde, it seems to sing its metaphysical prophecy:

Let us imagine, then, the tragic artist himself, in the light of the experience of a truly aesthetic audience: how he creates his figures like a prolific individuated god, in the sense that his work can hardly be seen as a "response to nature". but how then his mighty Dionysian impulse devours this whole phenomenal world, so that behind it, through its destruction, the highest primitive artistic joy in the bosom of the One can be apprehended.Of course, our aesthetes have nothing to say about this return to their original homeland, about the fraternal alliance of the two gods of art in tragedy, about the Apollinian and Dionysian excitement of the audience, but instead they take pains to recount the hero and the fate. The struggle against humanism, the triumph of the moral order of the world, the catharsis of tragedy, these are the real elements of tragedy.These clichés make me think that they are unaesthetic people, and perhaps only as moralists looking at tragedy.Not since Aristotle has an explanation of tragic effect been proposed from which audiences may infer artistic and aesthetic facts.Sometimes the pity and fear evoked by serious drama should lead to a catharsis of relief, and sometimes we should feel ourselves lifted and inspired by the triumph of good and noble principles, by the hero's sacrifice to a moral worldview.I do believe that, for many, this is the effect of tragedy, and only this; feel.This catharsis of pathology, this purification of Aristotle, which the linguists really do not know whether to count as a medical or a moral phenomenon, recalls a noteworthy reminder of Goethe.He said: "I have no active interest in pathology, and have never successfully dealt with a tragic scene, which I would rather avoid than seek. Perhaps this was also a virtue of the ancients: with them the highest passions were only Does the game of aesthetics, with us, have to have this effect with the aid of verisimilitude?" This last question, so significant, we can now affirm in the light of our beautiful experience, since it is precisely in watching musical tragedies that we wonder Feel how the highest passions can be but an aesthetic game, why we must believe that only now can the primitive phenomena of tragedy be described more successfully.Now whoever only talks about the substitution effects borrowed from the non-aesthetic field, and feels that he cannot go beyond the pathological and moral process, he only despairs of his aesthetic instinct.We suggested that he interpret Shakespeare in the style of Gervinus, as an innocent alternative, and that he try to study "poetic justice."

Therefore, with the rebirth of tragedy, the aesthetic audience is also reborn, and so far, they have been replaced by a kind of quid proguo, that is, "critics" with semi-moral and semi-academic demands.In his usual world, everything has been artificially embellished with just an appearance of life.Performing artists are at a loss as to what to do with such critical audiences, so they, and the playwrights and opera composers who inspire them, search anxiously for the pompous, boring, unenjoyable fellow. Remnants of life.Such "critics," however, make up the hitherto public; students, schoolchildren, and even the most innocent women have unconsciously acquired, through education and the press, the same understanding of works of art.To such a public, the best of artists can only hope to inspire their moral and religious faculties, substituting calls for a "moral world order" where they should entertain real audiences with powerful artistic charm.Or the playwright staged some of the great, at least exciting, tendencies of contemporary politics and society so vividly that the audience forgot about critical research and indulged in something like patriotism or wartime, parliamentary debate or criminal sentencing that passion.Violation of the true purpose of art necessarily leads directly to the worship of tendencies.What happens in all pseudo-arts, the sharp decline of tendencies takes place here, so that the tendency, for example, to use the theater for the moral education of the masses, which was taken seriously in Schiller's time, is now regarded as discredited. The obsolete antique.When critics dominate theaters and concerts, journalists dominate schools, and newspapers dominate society, art is reduced to a gossip, and aesthetic criticism is used to maintain vanity, laxity, selfishness, poor and uncreative. The bond of community, Schopenhauer's fable about the porcupine illustrates the meaning of this community.As a result, there has never been a time when art was so much talked about and so little respected.But can we still deal with a man who talks about Beethoven and Shakespeare?Everyone can answer this question according to his feelings, and his answer will necessarily show what the "culture" he imagines is, provided, of course, that he generally tries to answer the question without being dumbfounded at it.

But a man of sincere and gentle nature, who, in the above manner, has gradually become a savage critic, can still say something about the unexpectedness that a fortunately successful performance of "Lohengrin" produced for him. And the inconceivable effect is only when the hand that reminded him and pointed him may not be present, so the extremely complicated and incomparable feelings that shocked him at that time were always isolated, like the light of a mysterious star. flashes, then goes off.At that moment, he could roughly guess what an aesthetic audience is.