Chapter 4 The Birth of Tragedy Vol 4

tragic birth vol. self-critical attempt 1886 1 Why was this problematic book* written: this is undoubtedly a first-class, interesting question, and a deeply personal one - evidenced by the fact that it was written during the exciting 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War , but it was written regardless of the period.While the gunfire of the battle of Worth shook Europe, the author of this book, a meditator and a lover of riddles, sat quietly in a corner of the Alps, contemplating and guessing riddles, and the result was both sad and refreshing. left his thoughts on the Greeks—the core of this strange and difficult book, for which this preface (or epilogue) is now written.A few weeks later, he was under the city of Metz, still unable to let go of his so-called "optimistic" doubts about Greek art; Reconciled with myself, gradually recovering from a disease brought back from the battlefield, I believed that I could write the book "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music". —from the music?Music and tragedy?Greeks and tragic music?The Greeks and the pessimistic work of art?The healthiest, the most graceful, the most admirable, the most glamorous race that mankind has ever seen, these Greeks—how?Why must they have tragedy?And – must there be art?What is Greek Art? ...

① refers to.This article is a preface written by Nietzsche in 1886. It is thought-provoking how important questions about the value of existence are placed here.Must pessimism be a sign of decay, of degradation, of failure, of a weary and feeble instinct? —with Indians, and apparently with us "modern" people and Europeans, it does.But a kind of pessimism of the strong?A sane predilection for the hard, the horrible, the evil, the questionable, out of happiness, out of excess health, out of the fullness of existence?Perhaps there is a pain of overfullness?A kind of bravery with piercing eyes but begging for a try, thirsting for something terrible as for an adversary, a decent adversary, in order to test one's strength, to learn what "fear" is?What did the tragic myth mean in Greece at its best, strongest, and bravest?What does the great Dionysian phenomenon signify?Is tragedy born of it?On the other hand, is tragedy destroyed by moral Socratism, dialectics, the complacency and optimism of the theorists? —Why, isn't this Socraticism a sign of decay, of exhaustion, of disease, of disintegration of instinctive derangements?Wouldn't the "Greek Lotte" of the late Hellenistic spirit be but a flashback?Wouldn't the Epicurean will against pessimism be just a prudence of the suffering?Even science, our science—yes, all science, as a symbol of life, what does it mean?Where is all science going, and worse, where did it come from?Why, maybe the scientific spirit is just a kind of fear and escape from pessimism?An ingenious defense of truth?Something akin to cowardice and hypocrisy, in moral terms?In amoral terms, a cleverness?Oh, Socrates, Socrates, is this your secret?O mysterious sneer, is this your - sneer?

2 It was something terrible and dangerous that I was catching, a horned question, not necessarily a bull, but a new question anyway.Today I might as well say that it is the problem of science itself—for the first time, science is seen as problematic, dubious.And yet, what an incredible book this fresh-blooded, daringly skeptical book has a task unfit for a young man!It emerges from purely early and very immature personal experiences, all of which struggle to find expression; it is grounded in art—for scientific problems cannot be known on scientific grounds.Perhaps a book for the analytical and reflective artist (that is, for an exceptional type of artist that one must seek, but is not willing to seek...), full of psychological insights and artistic The mysteries of the novel, with an artist's metaphysics as its background, a work of youth full of youthful courage and youthful melancholy, not blindly obeying even where it seems to bow to an authority and show sincere respect, Proudly independent.In short, despite its ancient problems, despite its youthful ills, especially "too verbose" and "aggressive," it is a first, even from the Pejoratively speaking.On the other hand, it is a proven book again in terms of the effects it produced (especially on the great artist Richard Wagner for whom this book is written), I mean , it is a book that at least satisfies "the best of the time."For this reason it deserves to be respected and silenced; but for all that I do not wish to hide at all how distasteful it seems to me now, how foreign it is now to me after sixteen years,—and Those eyes are still familiar with the task with which this daring book first sets out: to examine science with the eyes of an artist, and art with the eyes of a human being...  

3 Again, it seems to me now that it's a marvelous book--I mean, it's badly written, clumsy, hard, imaginative, messy, sentimental, and girlishly sweet in places, The rhythm is not uniform, not interested in the clarity of logic, overconfident and despised the proof, and even do not believe in the legitimacy of the proof, just like writing a book for the acquainted, like playing for the art that has been baptized by music and is common and precious from the beginning Experiencing the "music" that connected people listen to, like a marker of identification for the artistically related, - a book of brash fanaticism, from the first page with the "educated" mortals (ProB fanum Vulgus, more than "the people", but as its effect has proved and still proves, it must be good at finding its sympathizers, leading them to new paths and dances.At any rate, the speaker here—and the people's curiosity and revulsion both confessed to it—was an unfamiliar voice, a disciple of an "unknown god," temporarily hiding under his scholar's hat, in the Beneath the German clumsiness and dialectical tedium, even beneath the Wagnerians' bad manners; what pours out here—one says to itself suspiciously—is a mystical, almost Dionysian soul One kind of thing, it is extremely difficult, involuntary, and can hardly decide whether to express itself or to hide itself, as if speaking in someone else's tongue.This "new soul" should have sung, not spoken!What a pity I did not have the courage to sing, like a poet, what I wanted to say: I might have been able to!Or, at least as the linguist does:—However, in this field, for the linguist, almost everything remains to be revealed and discovered!This question in particular: here a question is raised—and as long as we do not answer the question "What is the Dionysian spirit," the Greeks remain utterly incomprehensible and inconceivable...

4 Yes, what is the Dionysian spirit? ——This book proposes an answer,——the one who speaks in the book is a "knower", who is the confidant and believer of this god.Perhaps I will now speak more cautiously and humbly about such a difficult psychological problem as the origin of Greek tragedy.The fundamental question is the attitude of the Greeks to pain, their sensitivity,—is that attitude constant, or is it changing? —is this question: Is their ever-increasing thirst for beauty, for festivals, for joy, for new worship, actually born of lack, scarcity, melancholy, pain?If this is true—and Pericles (or Thucydides) has made it clear to us in the great eulogy—then the opposite craving, the craving for ugliness, manifested earlier, Where did the Greeks seek for pessimism, for tragic myths, for the concept of all terrible, evil, mysterious, destructive, and ominous things that are the basis of existence?Where does the tragedy come from?Perhaps out of joy, out of strength, out of overflowing health, out of excess abundance?What then does that madness, the Dionysian madness, which produces tragic and comic art, mean physiologically?Why, madness may not necessarily be a symbol of degeneration, decline, and doomsday culture?Maybe there's a -- a question to ask a psychiatrist -- a healthy neurosis?National adolescence and the neuroses of youth?What does it mean for God and the he-goat to become one in Satyr?From what personal experience, from what impulse, did the Greeks conceive such a Dionysian and primitive man as the Satyr?As for the origin of the tragic chorus, perhaps there was an earthly carnival in those centuries when the Greek body was alive and the Greek mind was alive?Perhaps fantasies and hallucinations haunted the whole city-state, the whole congregation?Why, when the Greeks were in the prime of life, they had a will for tragic things, and they were pessimists?In Plato's words, it was madness that brought Greece the greatest happiness?On the contrary, in the age of disintegration and decline, the Greeks became more and more optimistic, superficial, playful, more enthusiastic about logic and the logic of the world, and thus more "happy" and more "scientific"?How, against all "modern ideas" and prejudices of democratic taste, the triumph of optimism, preponderance of rationality, practical and theoretical utilitarianism (similar to and simultaneous with democracy), will be a declining force , approaching old age, a symbol of physical exhaustion?Isn't it pessimism then?Wasn't Epicurus an optimist precisely because he was a sufferer? ——It can be seen that this book has undertaken a large number of problems——we still have to make up the most difficult one of them!From the perspective of life, what does morality mean?

... ①Perikles, the leader of the ancient Greek democrats, was the supreme leader of Athens from 443 to 429 BC. The period he led was the heyday of Greek slavery. ② Thucydides (Thukydides, 460-396 BC), ancient Greek historian, author of "History of the Peloponnesian War". 5 In the preface to Richard Wagner, art—rather than morality—has been conceived as a metaphysical activity inherent in man; There is a good reason to survive.As a matter of fact, the whole book admits only one sense of the artist, behind all appearances a secret meaning of the artist—one "God" if you will, but no doubt only one who is wholly unspeculative. , the god of the amoral artist.He seeks to find the same joy and glory in building as in destroying, in good as in evil.He created the world free from the compulsion of fullness and overfullness, from the pain of contradictions that gathered in him.The world of divine salvation at every moment is the ever-changing, ever-new illusion of the most miserable, contradictory, conflicted beings who can save themselves only in appearance: one might as well Call this whole artist's metaphysics arbitrary, futile, and utopian—but the essence of the matter is that it already manifests a spirit that will one day dare to risk anything to rebel against the moral interpretation and meaning of existence.Here, perhaps for the first time, a pessimism "beyond good and evil" is heralded, and here the "perversion of opinion" which Schopenhauer so tirelessly opposed and which he furiously denounced and attacked beforehand, acquires language and form. ,—this is a philosophy which dares to place and degrade morality itself into the world of appearances, and not only "appearances" (in the sense of idealist terms), but also "deceptions" like appearances, illusions, delusion, Interpretation, organization, art alike.The extent of this anti-moral tendency is perhaps best measured by the discreet hostile silence maintained throughout the book on Christianity, the most extravagant cadenza of a moral theme ever heard by man.In fact, there can be no sharper contrast to the purely aesthetic understanding and justification of the world taught in this book than Christianity, which is only moral, and only wants to be moral, by its Absolute standards, such as the principle of the existence of God, drive art, every art, into the realm of lies—that is, negate, condemn, condemn.Behind this way of thinking and evaluating that must be hostile to art, I still feel something hostile to life, a resentful and vengeful hatred of life: because all life is based on appearances, art, deceit , optics, and the necessity of perspective and illusion.From the very beginning, Christianity was all about life's hatred and weariness of life, but this emotion was disguised, hidden, and disguised under a belief in a "beyond" or "better" life.A hatred of "the world," a condemnation of the passions, a fear of beauty and sensibility, an invention of an other in order to slander the other, and, after all, a longing for nothingness, doom, death, "last sabbath"—all this seems to me to be in harmony with Christianity. The absolute will, which recognizes only moral values, is always the most dangerous and ominous of all possible forms of the "will to perish," at least a symptom of life's morbidity, weariness, ill-humor, depletion, and deprivation—for, in Life is inevitably and forever powerless before morality (especially Christian morality, absolute morality), because life is essentially amoral,—and finally, under the weight of contempt and permanent negation, life must To be felt as something unworthy of desire, something worthless in itself.Morality itself—how, isn't morality a "will to deny life," a secret urge to destroy, a principle of decay, atrophy, slander, the beginning of an end?Wouldn't that be the greatest danger? ... So, then, in this problematic book, my instinct, as a defensive instinct of life, rose up against morality and created for itself a fundamentally opposite doctrine of life and a fundamentally opposite evaluation, a Purely aesthetic, anti-Christian doctrine and evaluation.Why is it named?As a linguist and a man of meaning, I named it with some boldness—for who knows the proper name for the Anti-Christian? —Take the name of a Greek god: I call it Dionysus.

6 Do people understand what a task I have boldly embarked on in this book? ... How I regret now that I did not then have the courage (or pride?) to use a unique language for such unique insights and adventures everywhere--I tried with difficulty to express in the formulas of Schopenhauer and Kant the same Their spirit and taste are diametrically opposed to strange and novel valuations!So, what did Schopenhauer think of tragedy?He said in the second volume: "What makes all tragedies particularly inspiring is this heightened awareness that the world, life, does not give real satisfaction and is therefore not worthy of our attachment. The spirit of tragedy is in it. So It leads us to resign ourselves to our fate." Oh, how differently Dionysus told me!Oh, just how out of tune this resignationism was to me then! —However, this book has a certain serious defect, which I now regret more than the Schopenhauer's formula to cover up and damage Dionysian premonitions, namely: I have harmed fundamentally by mixing with contemporary things. That's the great greek problem I'm facing!Where there is no hope, where failure is obvious, I still hope!I talk a lot about the "German spirit" on the basis of recent German music, as if it were emerging, rediscovering itself—and at a time when, not so long ago, the German spirit had the will to rule Europe and the power to lead it, now But it has already died, and under the beautiful pretext of building an empire, its decline has been concocted into moderation, democracy and "modern ideas"!In fact, during this period I have learned to view the "German spirit" with complete disillusionment and mercilessness, and the same with German music, as thoroughly Romantic, the most un-Greek of all possible art forms. form; besides, it is a first-class nerve-wrecking agent, doubly dangerous to a nation that drinks and regards obscurity as a virtue, that is to say, it has a double function, a narcotic that both intoxicates and befuddles. —Of course, apart from the rash hopes and incorrect applications of the contemporary age, which undermined my first book, it also persists throughout the book in raising the great Dionysian problem, including in music: a musical What must it be that it is no longer Romantic music, no longer German music—but Dionysian music? ...

7 —But, my sir, if your book is not Romanticism, what is Romanticism in the world?Can your artist metaphysics prefer to believe in nothingness, in the devil, than in the "now", and can show more extreme hatred of "modernity", "reality", "modern ideas" than this?In all your counterpoint and aural seduction, isn't there a rumbling of anger and hunger for destruction, a rage against everything "now", a nihilism not far from practical Is the will roaring?This will seems to cry: "Better have nothing be true than you be right, than your truth be established!" Listen to yourself, Mr. pessimist and deified artist, some of the sentences taken from your book, That is, those rather eloquent sentences about the dragon slayer will fascinate young ears and hearts.Why, isn't that the pure romantic confession of 1830, wearing the mask of pessimism of 1850?Afterwards, the common final movement of Romantics was played—discouraged, devastated, converted and worshiped by an old belief, that old god...Why, isn’t your pessimistic work an anti-Greek spirit? Isn't his Romantic work a kind of "intoxicating and bewildering" thing, at least a kind of anesthetic, even a piece of music, a piece of German music?Please listen:

"Let us imagine the growing generation, with such fearless eyes and such great ambitions; all dogmas of weakness, but to live courageously in wholeness and fullness—does not the tragic figure of this culture, then, as he educates himself to be serious and fearful, necessarily yearn for a new art, the metaphysical Art of consolation, longing for tragedy, as longing for Helen that is his? Must he cry with Faust: Shall I not by the infatuation of attachment, Bring the only beauty in life? " "Is it not for sure?"... No, no, never!You young romantics: not necessarily!But it could very well end up like this, and you could well end up like this, that you get "consolation," as I write, without any education of yourselves to become serious and fearful, and get "metaphysical comfort," in short In short, end up like the Romantics, in the Christian way... No!You must first learn the art of earthly consolation—you must learn to laugh, my young friends, unless you wish to be pessimists forever; so, as laughers, you may one day give all metaphysical consolation—metaphysical first— Throw it to the devil!Or, in the words of Zarathustra, the Dionysus:

"Cheer up your spirits, my brothers, up and up! Don't forget your legs too! Lift up your legs too, you good dancers, and it would be even better if you could erect dragonflies! "This crown of laughers, this crown of garlands of roses: I wear this crown myself, I myself declare my laughter sacred. Today I do not find others strong enough in it. "Zarathustra, the dancer, Zarathustra, the nimble one with wings ready to fly, a man who bids his birds take their places, a happy careless one:— "Zarathustra the seer, Zarathustra the true laugher, a man who is not impatient, a man who is not stubborn, a man who loves to dance, I put on myself The crown!

"This crown of laughers, this crown of garlands of roses: my brethren, I throw you this crown! I declare that laughter is holy: learn from me, you nobler ones—laugh!" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part Four) (Translated by Zhou Guoping)