Chapter 36 The Birth of Tragedy Chapter Twenty-Two

birth of tragedy Chapter Twenty Two Friends who are concerned, please imagine the effect of a real song music tragedy based on your own experience.I think I have described the phenomenon of this effect in two ways, so that you can now describe your experience.You will remember: seeing the mythology performed in front of you, you feel yourself raised to a state of "omniscience", as if your ability to see is not only an external ability, but can penetrate the inner, It is as if now, with the help of music, you witness the boiling of the will, the struggle of motives, the surge of passion, all within your grasp, as if you see countless vivid lines and shapes before your eyes, so that you can dive into the most subtle mysteries of subconscious emotions.Just when you feel that your requirements for concreteness and visualization have reached the highest level, you also clearly feel that the effect of this series of dream art still cannot produce unconscious blissful states of mind, like plastic artists and epic poets, That is to say, the real dream artist, as his works can evoke; this mood is the evidence of the state of individuality (individuatio) reached in unconscious contemplation, that is, the peak and essence of dream art.You see the stage realm visualized, but you deny it.You see the epic clarity and beauty of the tragic hero before you, yet you take comfort in the hero's demise.You know the plot of the play extremely well, yet you are willing to escape into the unknowable.You feel the hero's actions are justifiable, but when those actions lead to the hero's death, you are more invigorated.You are horrified at the sufferings of heroes, but you have a presentiment that they will bring a greater joy.You see wider and deeper than usual, but you prefer not to see it.How do we reason about this strange splitting of the ego, this collapse of the peak of the dream, which is not due to the magic of Dionysus?Although this kind of magic superficially stirs up the dream emotion and makes it reach its peak, it can force excessive dream power to serve it.The tragic myth, therefore, can only be understood as a symbol of Dionysian wisdom through the medium of dream art; And so it seemed to sing its detached death song:

in the sea of ​​joy In the surging waves, in the atmosphere In the loud echo, breathing in space everything that blows, drowned, drowned. No common sense, the highest ecstasy! So we can imagine the tragic artist himself from the own experience of the truly aesthetic spectator: he shapes his characters like a prolific god of individuation, and in this sense his work can hardly be called "imitation". "Nature"; on the other hand, his powerful drunken impulse absorbed the entire phenomenal world, so as to predict that beyond the phenomenon, because of the destruction of the phenomenon, there will appear the highest pleasure of the source of art in the embrace of the One.Of course, our aesthetes cannot write a word about the brotherly relationship of Oneiroi and Dionysus, how they returned to their homeland, and the dreamy or drunken excitement of the spectators, but they never tire of describing heroes and fates. The struggle of human beings, the victory of order in the moral world, and the purifying effect of tragedy play, and regard it as truly tragic.This kind of cliché makes me think that they may be people without aesthetic feeling. When they listen to tragedies, they can be called moralists.No one since Aristotle has proposed an explanation of the effect of tragedy that infers the psychology of the spectator from the reality of art, from aesthetic activity."Pity and Fear" is sometimes thought of as an emotional outburst that alleviates pain, prompted by a solemn plot; sometimes, it's thought that we feel exalted when we see the triumph of good and noble morality, when we see heroes sacrificed for a moral worldview and excited.It is true, I am convinced, that for most men this is the effect of tragedy, and only this; appreciate.The so-called pathological catharsis, Aristotle's catharsis——which philologists do not know whether to classify as a medical or a moral phenomenon—recalls Goethe's famous conjecture."I am not much interested in pathology," he said, "and I have never succeeded in writing a tragic scene of any kind, so I avoid the subject rather than explore it. Perhaps this is another virtue of the ancients: in their The highest appeal is nothing but an aesthetic game; in us, we must rely on realistic descriptions to produce such works?" As far as singing and music tragedies are concerned, we often find that the deepest appeal is actually an aesthetic game .We can now affirm Goethe's meaningful problem on the basis of our brilliant experience, and now we can affirm Goethe's meaningful problem on the basis of our brilliant experience, so we have good reason to believe that we can now describe with preliminary success The primitive phenomenon of tragedy.Now, if anyone still talks about the effects of substitution outside the sphere of aesthetic feeling, and feels that he cannot go beyond the explanation of pathological ethics, he must be disappointed in his own aesthetic ability; then, we advise him to follow Geer. Gerinus's method of interpreting Shakespeare, striving for poetic justice, is innocuous.

So, with the rebirth of tragedy, the aesthetic audience is also revived.In the past, the audience who sat in the theater instead of them was often a quid pro quo (quid pro quo) weirdo who pretended to be knowledgeable, the so-called "critic".In the past, within his scope, everything was an artificial illusion of life.The theater artist does not know what to do with such a fastidious audience; so the actor, and the dramatist or composer who inspires him, takes pains to find in such a dull, vain, unappreciative audience a little residual taste.However, it has always been these "critics" who make up the audience: schoolchildren, schoolchildren, and even the most innocuous women, have been insensibly taught and published in such a view of art.The best among artists can only hope to arouse their moral and religious sentiments in dealing with such audiences; where the real audience should be enchanted by a strong artistic appeal, the dramatist has to resort to the order of the moral world, or to the order of the moral world. To vividly portray some major, at least exciting, contemporary political and social tendency, for example, the patriotic movement or the age of war, parliamentary debates or criminal justice, so that the audience forgets to be picky and is attracted by such emotions;—this has The real purpose of de-art is so far away that it must fall directly into the superstition of this tendency.Here, however, the fate that has always befell all pseudo-art happened: the very rapid decline of these tendencies, such as the use of the theater as a means of popular education, which was taken seriously in Schiller's time, has now fallen into disarray. It is among the old customs that are not enough for training.When critics dominate theaters and concert halls, when journalists control schools, and newspapers dominate society, art is reduced to gossip after tea, and aesthetic criticism is dismissed as vain, frenzied, selfish, and ruthless. The means of poor, uninspired wretches.Schopenhauer used the metaphor of a porcupine to describe the character of such a man; as a result, art has never been so much talked about and so little esteemed.But can we still have a friend who can talk about Beethoven or Shakespeare?Let each answer this question according to his own feelings: he will show his knowledge of "culture" by his answer anyway, if he at least tries to answer the question, instead of being dumbfounded and speechless.

On the other hand, many privileged people, who have gradually become critical savages, as mentioned above, may also talk about the unexpected and inexplicable effect that the successful performance of "Lohengrin", for example, has had on them: However, perhaps because no one's hand was guiding or supporting him, all the incredible and incomparable feelings that excited him at that time were always independent, like a mysterious star that, after a flash, It went out.However, only then did he figure out the mood of the aesthetic audience. ①Lohengrin is a hero in a legend in the German Middle Ages. Wagner wrote the opera "Swan Rider" (Schwanenritter), and the protagonist is Lohengrin.